Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

PRIVATE BUSINESS

BIRMINGHAM CORPORATION BILL

Lords Amendments considered and agreed to.

FORTH ROAD BRIDGE ORDER CONFIRMATION (No. 2) BILL

Read the Third time and passed.

Oral Answers to Questions — EMPLOYMENT

Professional Footballers

Mr. Ellis Smith: asked the Minister of Labour how many times the representatives of Association football have had meetings with his Chief Conciliation Officer during the last two years; on how many occasions agreement was reached; and why a final settlement has not yet been arrived at.

The Minister of Labour (Mr. John Hare): There have been ten joint meetings and several preparatory meetings held separately with each side. An

agreement was reached on 18th January, and the terms of this agreement were clarified at a further joint meeting on 16th May. No final settlement has been reached because the annual general meeting of the Football League on 3rd June decided not to implement the agreement in full.

Mr. Ellis Smith: Does not the Minister agree that the players have been honourable and reasonable in their dealings? Is he aware that they now urgently and sincerely desire a settlement, and that they appreciate the services of his officers, especially the Chief Conciliation Officer? Will the right hon. Gentleman now consider the need to set up a representative industrial council, and will he consider inviting someone like Lord Monckton or Lord Citrine to preside over such a council?

Mr. Hare: I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman has said about my officers. As he knows, we have tried our best to get a settlement. I do not know whether he is aware that the Professional Footballers' Association are meeting on 28th June to consider a letter from the Football League which was sent on the 5th. Until that meeting takes place, I would rather not make any further comment.

Mr. Ellis Smith: Is the Minister aware that we all hope that good will come from the journey he is about to make, but that it will take him away from this country; so will he have a good talk to his Parliamentary Secretary so that he will act in the same way as the Minister?

Mr. Hare: I will certainly carry out the suggestion of the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Ellis Smith: asked the Minister of Labour if he will arrange for an inquiry to be made into the relation. ships which exist in Association football, and into the long drawn out differences resulting in the dispute in which his conciliation officer was concerned; and if he will publish the results of this inquiry so that a settlement may be reached acceptable to all interests.

Mr. Hare: I would not wish to rule out the possibility of a settlement being reached by negotiation between the parties and, in these circumstances, I do not think an inquiry would be appropriate.

Wages

Mr. Woof: asked the Minister of Labour if he is aware that the practice of many industrial firms in keeping a week's wages in hand imposes unnecessary hardship on men how, having been out of work, take up employment with such firms, that many such firms refuse to make advances to employees in respect of the payment of wages due to them, and that in consequence many men have to seek help from the National Assistance Board; and if he will consult with employers on this matter with a view to introducing legislation to protect workmen against such hardship.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour (Mr. Peter Thomas): This problem was discussed with representatives of employers and trade unions on my right hon. Friend's National Joint Advisory Council in 1952, and the British Employers' Confederation took steps to bring it to the attention of employers. Subsequently there was a marked drop in the number of men who had to seek help on this account from the National Assistance Board. The situation is kept under review and does not appear to call for further action at the present time. If, however, the hon. Member would like to write to me about any difficulties which are arising, I shall be glad to look into them.

Mr. Woof: I will take advantage of the hon. Gentleman's offer. Is he aware that this Question arises out of com-

plaints made to me following a recent statement by the Chairman of the National Assistance Board to the Magistrates' Association at Carlisle? Does he appreciate that thousands of workmen endeavour to retain their dignity, pride and honesty but on some unfortunate occasions are embarrassed by being forced to go to the National Assistance Board because of the attitude of some employers who refuse to grant their request for part of their lying-on wages? Is he aware that this creates undue hardship and a demand on public moneys? Finally, will the Parliamentary Secretary agree to worth-while consultations taking place with his right hon. Friend the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance in an endeavour to improve the position?

Mr. Thomas: I said that I should be pleased to hear from the hon. Member about any cases he has in mind. I realise that the practice of holding the first week's wage and refusing to make an advance may cause hardship in certain cases and, indeed, as the hon. Member said, may cause some wasteful Government expenditure. I hope that employers who keep a week's wages in hand and do not make advances will reconsider their policy in instances where this causes hardship.

Mr. Lee: I join the hon. Member in that last sentiment. Does he believe that it is necessary for employers to retain a week's wages in hand? I understand the old basis for it, when the office equipment was not as modern as it is today. It was then very difficult. Perhaps he will also consider putting to the N.J.A.C. the general thought that employers may care to look again at their arrangements to see whether they can cut down the number of days' pay they keep in hand.

Mr. Thomas: This matter was considered by the N.J.A.C. and, following that, there was a request by the B.E.C. to its constituent members in 1952. After that request the number of cases was cut down considerably. Apart from the complaint of the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Woof), there have been no complaints since then and we have no reason to believe that the improvement has not been maintained.

Wages Inspectors

Mr. Whitlock: asked the Minister of Labour whether he will increase the number of wages inspectors.

Mr. Hare: No, Sir. The numbers of wages inspectors employed are adequate for current needs.

Mr. Whitlock: Is it not a fact that for some years less than 10 per cent. of the establishments on the Wages Councils lists have been inspected and that as a result of these inspections over £100,000 per year has been recovered for employees who have been underpaid? Are we not entitled to assume from those figures that about £1 million a year remains in the pockets of unscrupulous and forgetful employers which should go into the pockets of people who are covered by these orders? Is it not time that these miserably low rates of pay were effectively enforced?

Mr. Hare: I can only repeat that I am satisfied that the present system is working. I am glad to say that in the past five years the proportion of employees found to be underpaid has fallen. I would take some action if I felt there was need for it, but I am satisfied with the present arrangements.

Disabled Persons, Ilkeston

Mr. Oliver: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware of the high percentage of registered disabled persons unemployed in Ilkeston, Heanor, Ripley and Alfreton; and what steps are being taken to enlarge the field of employment in useful and remunerative work.

Mr. P. Thomas: The rate of unemployment among registered disabled persons in these areas is lower than the rate among registered disabled persons in Great Britain as a whole. Our disablement resettlement officers take every opportunity of finding suitable openings for the disabled.

Mr. Oliver: I am glad to know that the percentage is lower in this area than in others, but it is quite high. The point which arises out of the Question is that the prospect for men out of work, in a district where industry is predominantly heavy, is remote. Those out of work have a very remote chance of finding employment unless there is some

enlargement of the field of work in which they can be employed, such as Remploy and similar occupations.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. and learned Member will come to the question.

Mr. Oliver: I beg your pardon, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: I was waiting for some interrogatory matter.

Mr. Oliver: Surely it was a natural sequence to the Answer.

Mr. Speaker: It is not the time to make speeches but the time to ask Questions. I have to go on about it in order to keep the House on the move.

Mr. Thomas: I agree with the hon. and learned Member that, in the main, the jobs in the area are heavy and, as such are unsuitable for disabled persons, but I am glad to say that about 400 additional jobs are expected to accrue in these areas, and the disablement re-settlement officers will see that disabled people benefit when these openings occur.

North-East

Mr. Grey: asked the Minister of Labour, in view of the failure of the Local Employment Act to stop the shift of population from the North-East, what other measures he will adopt to stop this trend.

Mr. Boyden: asked the Minister of Labour if his attention has been drawn to the Census Report which reveals considerable migration from the North-East during the past 10 years; and what action he proposes to deal with the problems involved.

Mr. Ainsley: asked the Minister of Labour what remedial plans he has in mind to stop the migration from the North-East to other parts of the country.

Mr. Hare: As I told my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Dame Irene Ward) on 12th June, through their distribution of industry policy the Government are encouraging firms to develop in parts of the country where unemployment is relatively high and discouraging developments in already congested areas. Changes in the geographical distribution


of the country's labour force are, however, bound to occur in an expanding economy.

Mr. Grey: I have read that reply, which means nothing. Is the Minister aware the continual migration from the North-East is having a disastrous effect on the area? Is he aware that during the last ten years half of those who have left have been under the age of 35? Is this not most undesirable, because not only is the North-East losing population but it is left with an unbalanced age population? Will he tell the House what steps he is taking to stop industry going into the already congested areas and to direct such industries to the North-East?

Mr. Hare: As I indicated, a good deal is being done.

Mr. Grey: What?

Mr. Hare: May I try to answer the hon. Gentleman? There are 21,000 jobs in prospect in the North-East, and 10,000 of these are in development districts. If we look back, we see that as a result of Board of Trade assistance and so on there were about 57,000 workers in Board of Trade factories. The Government's policy is, therefore, helping to bring industry to the North-East. But I repeat that if we want economic growth we must accept a degree of labour mobility.

Mr. Boyden: When the right hon. Gentleman says that the Government are doing these things, does he think that there is adequate co-operation between the different Government Departments? Would he consider convening a conference of the central Government Department and the local authorities on the problem and show some sign of coming to grips with the problem of the migration of the young from the North-East?

Mr. Hare: I agree that there should be very close co-operation between the Government Departments and all others concerned, and I maintain that there is. It is not fair to deny that much has been done.

Mr. Pentland: Does not the Minister agree that the Local Employment Act is expected to take account of future as

well as present unemployment? In view of the fact that this is having only a slight impression on the present unemployment position in the northeast of England, in spite of what he promised us, will he tell us how he expects to solve the long-term problem and thereby stop the drift of young people to other parts of the country looking for jobs?

Mr. Hare: I hope the hon. Member noticed that as a result of Government policy there are 21,000 jobs in prospect in the North-East at the moment.

Mr. Lee: Does the Minister agree that when he talks of a need for mobility of labour it should be a two-way street? In other words, the present mobility means that all are coming South. Many of my hon. Friends who represent towns throughout the North will certify that they are losing population rapidly. Will the Minister look again at the use of certification for extensions in the South in order to try to persuade those who wish to extend their businesses in the South that they will be short of labour if they do and that they will be far better served if they agreed to go to the North?

Mr. Hare: The hon. Member and I have no quarrel on this. I made it clear in my Answer that we are encouraging firms to develop in parts of the country where unemployment is relatively high and are discouraging them from developing in congested areas.

Apprenticeship and Training Schemes

Mr. Prentice: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is ready to make a statement on the possibility of introducing a differential training levy on industry in order to stimulate apprenticeship schemes and other forms of training, following the recent visit of some of his officials to France to study the system there.

Mr. Hare: As the hon. Gentleman knows, a study of this whole question is being made, but I am not yet ready to make a statement.

Mr. Prentice: Is the Minister likely to make that statement before the House rises for the Summer Recess? Will he bear in mind that there is a great deal of urgency in this matter, especially as


the bulge of school-leavers begins leaving school in four or five weeks' time? Even though a plan could not be in operation by then, if he made an announcement it might have a moral effect and improve the chances of those school-leavers.

Mr. Hare: I am afraid that I cannot give the hon. Member that assurance. These are far-reaching and important issues which will need plenty of time for consideration.

Disabled Persons, Hillington

Lady Tweedsmuir: asked the Minister of Labour how many applications for training as machine operators at Hillington have been received in Aberdeen; and whether he is getting sufficient volunteers.

Mr. P. Thomas: Since recruitment began in March there have been six applications. The number depends upon the availability of disabled persons suitable for training.

Lady Tweedsmuir: Although the employment position in Aberdeen is much better than it has been for the last four years, does not the Minister think that more could be done to encourage the disabled to join this scheme, because there are large numbers of men who could benefit from it?

Mr. Thomas: These facilities for training are already being brought to the notice of disabled persons calling at the exchange who might benefit.

Easington

Mr. Shinwell: asked the Minister of Labour if he will state the total population in the Easington Parliamentary division at the census in 1951 and at the present date; and what is the number of insured workers in the area now and in 1951, respectively.

Mr. P. Thomas: 82,170 in 1951 and 85,156 in 1961. Figures of insured employees in the Parliamentary division are not available, but in the wider area consisting of the Haswell, Houghton-le-Spring, Horden, Seaham Harbour and Wingate employment exchange areas, there were 60,784 insured employees in 1951 and 59,940 in 1960.

Trade Unions

Mr. Lee: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is satisfied with the arrangements for negotiation, conciliation and arbitration obtaining in the trades, services and professions staffed by white collar unions; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Hare: The arrangements vary so much in different trades, services and professions that it is not possible to express a general opinion. If the hon. Member is concerned about the arrangements in any particular sector, perhaps he would inform me. I would be pleased to consider any points he cares to raise.

Mr. Lee: While thanking the Minister for that reply, may I ask him whether he does not agree that we are now seeing a new phenomenon in the rise of white collar unions and an improvement in the industries and the professions in which they are engaged? We now see in banking, insurance and professions of that type—and now in the teaching profession—that these unions are not content to have to go on with the old struggle which the manual unions had 100 years ago. Would it not be far better if the Ministry, with the N.J.C., considered how to short-circuit this to eliminate any dangers there may be of industrial unrest among these organisations?

Mr. Hare: The hon. Member will remember that we had a very useful debate on this subject on 17th March. I have not much to add to what my hon. Friend said then, except to say that I have had some discussions with interested parties.

Betting Industry (Apprenticeships)

Mr. Lawson: asked the Minister of Labour if he will describe the nature of the apprenticeship scheme operated by the betting industry, giving the length of time required to be served, the qualifications demanded, and the percentage of apprentices in the industry at present enrolled in the appropriate day release classes.

Mr. P. Thomas: There is no apprenticeship schema for the betting industry as such. Figures recently published by the Department showed


sixteen boys and five girls entering apprenticeships or learnerships in the industry in 1960. Of these, two boys entered the industry as apprentices in engineering and printing occupations; one boy and four girls entered the industry as clerks, not as apprentices; eleven boys and one girl entering apprenticeships in other industries were wrongly classified as entering the betting industry and two cases cannot be traced. I apologise for these errors, which are partly due to changes in the industrial coding.

Mr. Lawson: The published figures from which the information has been taken show there were more apprentices this year than ever before. Are not these figures exceedingly unreliable? Will the Minister look much more closely into the question of how the figures are arranged and obtained so that we can get some reliable information about the number of apprentices in industry?

Mr. Thomas: I do not think the Answer I gave shows that the figures as a whole are unreliable. My inquiries have shown that the mistakes are mainly due to the recent introduction of the betting industry under a separate heading in the statistics, which apparently has led to some confusion between the new heading and previously existing headings. A new procedure which is to come into operation next month has as one of its objectives to reduce the possibility of such errors.

Factory, Camborne (Closure)

Mr. Hayman: asked the Minister of Labour what success he has had in finding other jobs for workers displaced by the decision of Imperial Chemical Industries to close its factory at Camborne, Cornwall; and how many of these jobs were outside the county.

Mr. P. Thomas: Since the decision to close the factory was announced, two men and twenty-nine women have been discharged. Both men and eighteen women registered at the employment exchange. Of these, one man is still unemployed. The remainder secured employment locally. The factory will finally close at the end of July, and, in agreement with the firm, the employment exchange has taken advance regis-

trations for forty-two men and ninety-one women seeking other employment.

Mr. Hayman: I find it rather difficult to understand the figures, because four years ago there were 500 workers in this factory? Will the hon. Gentleman do all he can, using whatever influence he may possess, to persuade I.C.I. to run another industry in my constituency instead of leaving us entirely in the lurch?

Mr. Thomas: It is true that the labour force was originally 500. It has been reduced, but the reduction has been mainly due to retirements and resignations. Only 31 people have been discharged. As to the employment situation, I understand from the President of the Board of Trade that there are 500 jobs in prospect in the Camborne-Redruth area.

Mr. Hayman: Can the hon. Gentleman say how many of the employees have decided not to take up other work? A considerable number of married women were concerned.

Mr. Thomas: I cannot give the exact figure, but 67 of the 200 employees affected did not accept the offer of interview by our employment exchanges. It may well be that they will leave the employment field.

Terms and Conditions of Employment Act, 1959

Mr. Lee: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is aware that the Terms and Conditions of Employment Act, 1959, is not providing satisfactory arbitration procedure; and what action he proposes to take in the matter.

Mr. Hare: I have had representations made to me on various points, but I think that during the short period the Act has been in operation it has been fulfilling the purpose for which it was intended. I have no action in mind at the present time.

Mr. Lee: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that N.A.L.G.O. is experiencing great difficulty with certain local authorities which will not honour agreements? Does he realise that when the Industrial Disputes Tribunal went out of being it left a gap, as some of us on this side of the House said at the


time it would? If we cannot have some form of arbitration to take the place of the Tribunal, we may well see unrest because of the lack of facilities for the unions to go to arbitration.

Mr. Hare: I understand what the hon. Member has in mind, but I think we need more experience of the existing legislation before we think about possible revision.

Wages and Productivity

Mr. Ridsdale: asked the Minister of Labour what was the increase in percentage of negotiated hourly wage costs in 1960; what was the average increase over the whole period since 1957 to the latest convenient date; and how this compares with productivity growth during this period.

Mr. Hare: In the manufacturing industries, hourly wage rates rose by 7·9 per cent. in 1960 and at the end of March 1961 were 21·8 per cent. higher than at 1st January, 1957. Output a head in these industries decreased by about 1 per cent. in 1960 and in the first quarter of 1961 was about 10 per cent. higher than in the first quarter of 1957.

Mr. Ridsdale: Would my right hon. Friend agree that these figures are most disturbing in view of the lack of increase in productivity? Has he read the Report of the O.E.E.C., published in May, 1961? What is he doing to meet some of the main criticisms which say that institutional arrangements in a number of industries are antiquated, there is weakness in central bodies on both sides of industry, and arbiters have no definite norm to take as a guide when making awards? Is he aware that this Report is most disturbing and that we hope he is not going to be mesmerised by the problems of the Common Market but will get down to tackling these labour problems, which are the core and pith of all the problems in this country today?

Mr. Hare: I assure my hon. Friend that, apart from a short visit abroad, I shall concentrate all my efforts on the matters of which he has been talking. As he knows, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has made cleat on a number of occasions—and rein-

forced only last week—the real dangers which inflation could bring to this country.

School Leavers, South-West Durham

Mr. Slater: asked the Minister of Labour, in view of anxiety regarding juvenile employment this year in southwest Durham, if he will institute, through his divisional offices, an inquiry regarding new vacancies for apprentice training to assist in meeting the employment situation of school leavers this year.

Mr. P. Thomas: No, Sir. I do not think a special inquiry of the kind suggested is necessary. The Youth Employment Service is keeping the position under constant review.

Mr. Slater: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the east Durham area has been seriously affected over the last few years in the matter of employment and the apprenticeship of young people leaving school? Is he further aware—as he has said that his juvenile officers are looking into this matter—that the time has arrived, in view of the seriousness of the position, for his Department, with the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Education, to enter into conversations about the employment of young people who will be leaving school at the end of this term?

Mr. Thomas: I appreciate the employment difficulties in south-west Durham, but the present indications are that there has been an improvement. In addition, the percentage of boys entering apprenticeships is higher there than in the country as a whole. In 1960, in the Northern Region it was 40·1 per cent. compared with 36 per cent. for the whole country.

Mr. Slater: asked the Minister of Labour how many school leavers have been placed in apprenticeship schemes during the last 12 months in south-west Durham; how these figures compare with those for the rest of the county; and what proposals he has to meet the demand for juvenile employment at the close of the summer term this year.

Mr. P. Thomas: Figures for the last twelve months are not available, but reports indicate that the percentage of boys obtaining apprenticeships in southwest Durham is higher than in the


country as a whole. The Youth Employment Service will do all it can to help summer school leavers find employment.

Mr. Slater: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that, unless employment can be found for these young people on leaving school, it will have serious effects upon the whole area? It is all very well for him to say that the percentage of boys obtaining apprenticeships in this area is much higher than in any other part of the country. I concede that that is correct in the eastern part of the country, but it is not correct in the south Durham area. Is he aware that the parents are very concerned? All they ask is that the same privileges and opportunities should be granted to their children as are given to children in other parts of the country?

Mr. Thomas: The employment prospects for girls in the area are satisfactory. While I agree that the outlook for boys is less favourable than that for girls, it has greatly improved over the last year, and the rapid absorption of the Easter school leavers is very encouraging. On 12th June, out of 571 Easter school leavers four boys were left. The area is a development district under the Local Employment Act, and I am glad to say that there are now 1,600 jobs in prospect.

Mr. Boyden: Is not the Parliamentary Secretary aware that these figures are very patchy, because that 40 per cent. includes a number of boys and girls who are travelling enormous distances from places like Middleton-in-Teesdale and Barnard Castle? The position is certainly not as rosy as he makes out.

Mr. Thomas: I am giving the general figure. I agree that in certain areas there could be considerable improvement.

Angola

Mr. Brockway: asked the Minister of Labour what action has been taken by the International Labour Office arising from Ghana's complaint of the use of slave labour in Angola.

Mr. Hare: The I.L.O. has set up a Commission to examine the complaint made by the Government of Ghana that the Government of Portugal are not observing the Abolition of Forced

Labour Convention in Angola and Mozambique.

Mr. Brockway: Has the Minister seen the reports by Baptist missionaries and others of how thousands of Africans over a period of years have been kidnapped from their villages for forced labour, not only in the public service, but on sugar, sisal and other private plantations? Can he give us an assurance that the Government representative on the Council of the I.L.O. voted in favour of this investigation?

Mr. Hare: Both parties were agreeable to setting up the Commission, and no vote was taken at the time.

Mr. Biggs-Davison: Without asking the Government to interfere in the internal affairs of any country, may I ask my right hon. Friend if it is not the case that there are Arab, African and Communist member States of the I.L.O. and U.N.O. where slavery, the slave trade and forced labour are long-established institutions.

Mr. Prentice: Will the Minister confirm that this country has ratified the I.L.O. Convention against forced labour? In view of that, will he give the House an assurance that the United Kingdom delegate will continue to vote for the most stringent degree of investigation in this case and that the British attitude will not be in any way confused or ambiguous, as our attitude has been on other issues affecting Angola?

Mr. Hare: The whole point is that the I.L.O. has agreed to set up a Commission. The Commission has been constituted. It hopes to have a report ready for the November meeting of the governing body of the I.L.O. The Commission is there to do its job, and until the report is available we do not want to ask too many hypothetical questions.

National Service (Call-up)

Mr. Lipton: asked the Minister of Labour how many men are still liable to call-up for National Service, and in what ages or categories.

Mr. Hare: All British male subjects resident in Great Britain born before 1st January, 1941, and under 26 years of age are still liable under the National Service Acts, unless they have already


served. They number about a million, but I would remind the hon. Gentleman of my reply on this subject to my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Sir S. Summers) on 18th November last year.

Mr. Lipton: Does this mean that about 1 million men are still liable for call-up under the National Service Acts? As men not issued with enlistment notices before 17th November last are not to be called up, has not the time come to tidy up the whole of this business with the least possible delay, because this means that quite a number of people still do not know what their position is likely to be?

Mr. Hare: I think the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that we should repeal the National Service Acts, but these Acts cover men at present serving.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: Is it really right that there are 1 million men liable to call-up? Is there any ambiguity as to their status and risk of call-up in the circumstances?

Mr. Hare: The figures are as I have just given the House.

Mr. Lipton: This is an alarming statement. Most members of the general public do not realise that this is the case. Can the Minister split up the figures or give us some further information, because his reply is most disconcerting?

Mr. Hare: Yes, I will certainly undertake to do that.

Smith's Motor Accessories (Strike)

Mr. Skeet: asked the Minister of Labour if he will make a statement about the strike at Smith's Motor Accessories of Cricklewood.

Mr. Hare: This is an unofficial strike in support of a claim for higher wages. The procedure of the engineering industry for dealing with disputes has not been exhausted and the unions mainly concerned have instructed their members to return to work so that their claim may be dealt with through the procedure. I have asked the unions to take urgent steps to secure an early resumption of work and I very much hope their efforts will be successful. It is most

regrettable that a group of workers should take unofficial and unconstitutional action contraary to their own unions' instructions, most especially when this action throws thousands of their fellow workers out of employment, damages the good name of the trade union movement, and weakens a great industry which is vital to the prosperity of this country.

Mr. Skeet: The Minister seems to have conceded two points. First, the strike is causing disproportionate injury to industry elsewhere. [HON. MEMBERS: "Question."] I am coming to the question. The second point is that the strike is unofficial. What security have the public, workers in industry generally, and also the export drive in such a situation as this, or do we have to say that this is one of the irreconcilable problems of democracy?

Mr. Hare: I think that my hon. Friend has had a very clear expression of my feeling, which I think is shared by hon. Members on both sides of the House. I earnestly hope that as we get better understanding on these matters between both sides of industry incidents of this sort will not arise and, therefore, will not have the consequences to which I have just pointed.

Mr. Lindsay: I acknowledge the outstanding efforts my right hon. Friend is making to bring about better relations in this industry. May I ask him if he has seen the statement by prominent trade union leaders that there is a connection between this stoppage and the one at Lucas's—the connection being a subversive movement with headquarters overseas? Will he get in touch with these trade union leaders to see if he can give them any assistance in their admirable intention of making this fact widely known?

Mr. Hare: I have seen the newspaper reports to which my hon. Friend has referred, but I have no clear information on the subject. I think that there is a great deal of confusion in the minds of the strikers. When there is a great deal of confusion in the minds of strikers, it always lends itself to subversive influence.

Mr. Lee: Is the Minister aware that we on this side of the House join with him in hoping that the strikers will take


note of the advice given by the trade union leaders and return to work? Is he aware also that there is still only one nation in the world with a better strike record than the United Kingdom? Will the Minister inquire into this case and find out if it is a fact that the workers concerned cannot get access to higher management? In many industries which are now enlarging, when there is a large firm with a number of ancillaries, the workshop machinery for negotiating cannot function because the employers will not give proper powers of decision to people other than the higher management itself.

Mr. Hare: I agree with what the hon. Member said in the first part of his supplementary question, and I will certainly take note of what he said at the end.

Scotland

Mr. Rankin: asked the Minister of Labour if he will state how the percentage rate of unemployment for Scotland now compares with that for Great Britain; what are the numbers involved; and how remedial schemes are progressing in Scotland.

Mr. Hare: At 12th June 2·8 per cent., 59,766. in Scotland and 1·2 per cent., 266,705, in Great Britain. There are about 31,000 jobs in prospect in Scotland, including 27,000 in the development districts.

Mr. Rankin: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that those figures, bad as they are, conceal a position which in parts is even worse than the figures he has given? Is he aware that in my division more and more men are being paid off from shipbuilding every week? More are being paid off now than a year ago. When will some of the many jobs concealed in the "pipelines" be released to remedy this state of affairs?

Mr. Hare: As I think the hon. Gentleman is aware, although there has been some contraction in that industry, things in Scotland are better on the whole, and I think that the Government deserve considerable credit for playing their part in getting extra diversification. There are such things as the new strip mill at Ravenscraig and the Bathgate project for the British Motor Corporation. All these things are maturing and will in

time produce the extra jobs. Even so, what has already been achieved has produced this large number of extra jobs, which means, I am glad to say, that the unemployment figure in Scotland is lower than it has been for four years.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Does that reply mean that we can be optimistic and confident about the future of the shipbuilding industry on the Clyde?

Mr. Hare: I do not say anything of the kind. I said that as a result of the many measures put forward by the Government there was a greater diversification, which means that people have more choice of jobs in different types of industry than has ever before been the case in Scotland.

Apprenticeships

Mr. Manuel: asked the Minister of Labour whether he is now able to make a forecast of the number of extra apprenticeships likely to be available to school leavers in Scotland this year.

Mr. Hare: No, Sir. It is not possible to make any precise forecast, but reports reaching me give welcome indications that there is likely to be a good increase in apprenticeship numbers this year.

Mr. Manuel: Is it not abundantly clear to the right hon. Gentleman that, even with the increase that he indicated might be reached this year, we shall, because of the number of school leavers, find that the number of those getting apprenticeships will fall far short of the number desiring them? Does he realise that this means that a large number of these boys and girls will go into dead-end jobs when they should be taking technical training to fit them for proper apprenticeships?

Mr. Hare: As I think I have indicated already in the House, and as I certainly have in Scotland, there are in Scotland considerable shortages of skilled labour, and it is my constant appeal to employers—and pressure is put on them—to provide as many apprenticeships as possible. I hope that hon. Members on both sides will support me in every way in the efforts I am making in this direction.

Mr. Prentice: Can the Minister be more specific about his hopes for increased numbers of apprenticeships in


Scotland? Is the number likely to be proportionate to the increase in the numbers of school leavers?

Mr. Hare: I cannot give the answer to that. There is no way of giving any precise figure, but what I have said in answer to the Question is that I think there should be a good increase in the numbers.

Mr. Hoy: Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that it is because of the lack of these jobs in Scotland that our unemployment percentage is still more than twice that of the rest of Britain, and what we want to know is what he and his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland are doing to put the matter right?

Mr. Hare: I quite agree with the hon. Gentleman that the unemployment rate is higher in Scotland than in England and Wales, but I am glad to say that unemployment in Scotland has fallen to 2·8 per cent., which is a considerable improvement.

Mr. Willis: asked the Minister of Labour if he will discuss with the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland the possibility of encouraging local education authorities to promote group apprentice schemes, based on local technical colleges.

Mr. Hare: My right hon. Friends have issued circulars encouraging education authorities to provide first-year apprenticeship courses in technical colleges. Though this assistance is not limited to particular types of apprenticeship scheme, it is expected that these courses will be of particular benefit to small firms which find it difficult to provide adequate training facilities except by sharing in co-operative enterprise.

Mr. Willis: Can the right hon. Gentleman say what response there has been to this appeal and, in particular, what has been done in Scotland?

Mr. Hare: If the hon. Gentleman would like me to give him full particulars, I shall certainly let him know. It is probably better to do it in that way.

Miss Herbison: If local education authorities do provide such courses which are so necessary in Scotland, what financial aid will they get from the central Government, because that is of the

greatest importance to the working of the general grant?

Mr. Hare: I think that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education will be discussing these matters with local education authorities in England and Wales; and by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland with those in Scotland. I think that these matters come within their purview rather than mine.

Mr. Bence: asked the Minister of Labour if he will take steps to establish a national bureau of apprenticeships so that there is full information about the numbers in training and the opportunities which exist.

Mr. Hare: No, Sir. I see no need for this. Information about those entering apprenticeships is already collected on a national basis. Details of the opportunities in industry are know locally to the youth employment offices, and there is already a system for the circulation of vacancies between youth employment officers.

Mr. Bence: No doubt the Minister appreciates our need for a considerable increase in productivity in the engineering industry, but is he aware that many of the apprenticeship schemes are hopelessly inadequate to produce the engineers necessary for the new industries, and the new techniques appearing in modern engineering? Will he not, therefore, undertake a survey to find out how many of our industrial apprenticeships are worthy of the name and likely to turn out top-class skilled men?

Mr. Hare: As I think the hon. Gentleman knows, I am in sympathy with much that he says. As recently as our last debate on this subject in the House, I made it clear that I thought that the time had come when both sides of industry should look in detail at all their apprenticeships, and this is something that I shall certainly try to pursue with both sides of industry.

Mr. Ross: asked the Minister of Labour what methods are used by his Department to estimate the number of school-leavers who enter apprenticeships or some other form of organised training for skill.

Mr. P. Thomas: At the time of issue of National Insurance cards to school


leavers on their entering employment, a record of the class of employment is made for statistical purposes by the youth employment offices. One of the classifications is apprenticeship or learnership to a skilled craft; another, introduced from the beginning of this year, covers other forms of organised training for skill.

Mr. Ross: While thanking the Parliamentary Secretary for that reply, may I ask whether he appreciates that his Answer to Question No. 14 rather shattered our confidence in the customary reliability of his Department?

Mr. Thomas: No. I think that the statistics are reasonably reliable. In fact, they probably understate the total entry of apprentices, as numbers of boys and girls enter into apprenticeships after previously having had other employment on leaving school.

Mr. Manuel: Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that his Department should be doing far more on the lines requested by my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock in his Question? As it is, it seems that he can only tell us of young people who take up apprenticeships 12 months after leaving school because they could not previously get into industry. Should not his Department be dealing with these school leavers earlier?

Mr. Thomas: Instructions have recently been given to youth employment officers which strengthen the system so as to ensure that the statistics are as comprehensive as possible.

Training Development Officers, Scotland

Mr. Woodburn: asked the Minister of Labour whether he will increase the grant paid to the Industrial Training Council so as to enable that Council to make further appointments of training development officers in Scotland.

Mr. Hare: If the Council should wish to make further appointments, they can be made within the existing grant.

Mr. Woodburn: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that not much is likely to result from one lonely soul wandering over Scotland trying to start these schemes, and that at the moment some of our more modern and highly-skilled

engineering organisations cannot get apprentices and apprenticeship schemes going? Will the Minister be prepared to send representatives of both sides of industry to the Continent to see what properly organised apprenticeship schemes are doing to create skilled young men? Is he aware that the time has gone for training apprentices by making them "run the cutter" and taking betting-slips?

Mr. Hare: I really do not think that it is just one lone figure wandering over Scotland. The engineering and iron and steel industries have their own schemes, and certain other industries have their plans, in which Scotland is included. Of course, there is also the whole weight of the Industrial Training Council, which is pressing forward in its treatment of this problem. I do not think that the picture is as black as the right hon. Gentleman is suggesting.

Mr. Prentice: Even so, are there only 10 full-time training development officers employed by the Industrial Training Council in the United Kingdom, of whom only one is stationed in Scotland? Does the Minister think that so small a number can possibly make the impact necessary for what will be needed in the next 10 years?

Mr. Hare: I was very clear in my Answer. In addition to the officers of the Industrial Training Council, other industries have their own training councils and are sharing in the general effort. Both sides of industry are taking part in the follow-up, which all reinforces the efforts of the officers of the Industrial Training Council.

Industrial Development, Scotland

Mr. Rankin: asked the Minister of Labour what modifications will be imposed on the Scottish industrial development programme as a result of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's curtailment of Government expenditure.

Mr. Hare: My right hon. and learned Friend has announced no detailed plans for the curtailment of Government expenditure.

Mr. Rankin: But, of course, is the Minister not aware that if the Question had been framed in that way it would


not have reached the Order Paper, for it would have been hypothetical? Is the Minister telling us, then, that in his speech on Thursday night the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not make it perfectly clear that he proposes to reduce or to modify, if necessary, Government expenditure abroad? Is that untrue? Is it also untrue that the Chancellor made it perfectly clear that he proposes to restrict building schemes, and will that not affect Scottish industrial development programmes?

Mr. Hare: I admire the ingenuity of the hon. Gentleman in getting this Question on the Order Paper in the form he has. As far as the interpretation of my right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor's speech is concerned, I would suggest that the Chancellor is available to be questioned on these matters in the House, and I feel sure that he would be able to give a better account than I could.

Mr. Rankin: Ingenuity!

Oral Answers to Questions — AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND FOOD

Johne's Disease

Mr. P. Browne: asked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will authorise the use of the vaccine to immunise cattle against Johne's disease now that the whole country is designated an attested area.

The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Christopher Soames): Much study is being made of immunisation as a method of controlling Johne's disease, but with the present state of knowledge it would not be wise to authorise the general use of vaccine against this disease while tuberculin testing is still a regular feature.

Mr. Browne: Has the Minister read the Answer which his predecessor gave to me on 7th July last year? If not, will he do so? If he has, will he bear in mind the losses incurred by farmers due to Johne's disease, and now that this country is an attested area as a whole, surely farmers should be allowed—those who wish to—to immunise their cattle against this disease?

Mr. Soames: I think that we would all be very glad if we could discover a vaccine which would be effective against Johne's disease without having a bad effect and creating more difficulties in the testing for tuberculosis, which still has to continue even though the country as a whole is clear. We have still to protect ourselves against T.B. breaking out again, and if we could find a suitable vaccine—and there are experiments going on in 350 farms at the moment—we would be glad to go forward on it.

Barley

Mr. Prior: asked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether in view of the low prices prevailing for barley, he will take steps to make an advanced deficiency payment for the 1961 crop at harvest time.

Mr. Soames: No, Sir. It would not be practicable to make advance deficiency payments to barley growers at harvest time. But I am well aware of the importance to growers of these payments and they will be made as early as possible.

Mr. Prior: Is my right hon. Friend aware that if the low prices for barley continue as at present the orderly marketing of this year's crop will be quite impossible. Small farmers depend enormously on the cash that they obtain at harvest time from barley. If prices are going to be as low as we think they will, farmers will not get this cash and the only satisfactory alternative will be to place an embargo on cheap subsidised imports coming in.

Mr. Soames: That is a different question and concerns our attitude towards importation. Concerning our own marketing, we have certain proposals that have been agreed with producer interests which, we hope, will make a contribution towards the more orderly marketing at home.

Sir A. Hurd: Will the Minister use all his persuasive powers around the Cabinet table, with the President of the Board of Trade, to ensure that we take quick and effective measures to stop the dumping of foreign barley.

Mr. Soames: As my hon. Friend knows, an application was submitted by the National Farmers' Union to the


Board of Trade exactly a week ago today on this matter, and it is, I know, receiving the close attention of my right hon. Friend.

Mr. de Freitas: Does the Minister remember that at least six months ago we were warning him of a possible disaster in barley and asking him to call an international conference of exporters? Will he not now please call that conference, because it is better late than never.

Mr. Soames: An international conference is a different question to that on the Order Paper and that contained in the supplementary questions to it. It raises many difficult problems—of which, I am sure, the hon. Gentleman is fully aware—and it would not be efficacious if we were merely to have a conference of exporters. Importers would have to be represented as well, and there are no signs in the international field that support for that would be forthcoming

Land Drainage

Mr. Prior: asked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will state the number of acres drained under drainage grants during the last year; and whether he is satisfied with the rate of progress.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. W. M. F. Vane): In 1960, farm under-drainage schemes benefited some 110,000 acres. Information about the total acreage benefitting from all drainage work is not available. I can, however, tell my hon. Friend that grant-aid from the Department towards farm drainage schemes rose from £1⅔ million in 1958–9 to nearly £2½ million in 1959–60, and towards arterial drainage schemes from £2¾ million to £3⅓ million. This is good progress, but there is still much work to be done.

Mr. Prior: If, as I am certain he does, the Joint Parliamentary Secretary wishes to help small farmers in the improvement of their farms, he will realise that good drainage is the basic essential of all good farming. Will he not consider an increase in the grant, from 50 per cent. to some higher figure, to encourage this further?

Mr. Vane: Of course, it is realised that good drainage is important for any farming, but 50 per cent. is a substantial proportion of the cost of the work involved, and I think that very good reasons would have to be put forward before we could consider increasing it.

Beef

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: asked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what is the estimated cost of deficiency payments to the agricultural industries in respect of beef for the past six months.

Mr. Soames: The estimated cost of deficiency payments paid on fat cattle for the 26 weeks ended 3rd June, 1961, is £12½ million.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: Will my right hon. Friend not agree that this is a high total indeed? Is he aware that in a reply to me on 19th June the President of the Board of Trade stated that over £11½ million worth of beef was imported into this country in the first four months of this year? Will the Minister look into the question of these imports, which are causing farmers to receive a high subsidy? Surely it would be better to restrict imports and pay less subsidy to the farmers, who do not want so much.

Mr. Soames: Concerning the first part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question as to whether it is a large figure, it is, of course, a large figure, but it is less than 50 per cent. of the published estimate, adjusted after the Price Review, for the total deficiency payments for fat cattle. Concerning the second part about imports, in the last six months imports from abroad have been about 12 per cent. lower than for the same period last year, when the market at home was considerably higher.

Mr. Prior: Will the Minister talk to the butchers to see if he can stop them from averaging out prices of various commodities, such as beef and pork, so that we can get a true reflection of the falls in prices of beef to the consumer?

Mr. Soames: Of course, much averaging out goes on between different meats in the butchers' shops. It would be advantageous for the system as a whole if falls in the price of a certain


type of meat were to be reflected in the retail price in such a way as to increase demand.

Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Sir A. Hurd: asked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what further reports he has received from his veterinary officers in Argentina showing the progress of the Argentine Government's campaign to confine foot-and-mouth disease by compulsory vaccination; and if the measures so far taken have had any significant effect on the risk of infection being carried by chilled and frozen meat shipped to the United Kingdom.

Mr. Soames: It seems clear from reports by my veterinary officers in the Argentine that the Argentine Government's vaccination campaign against foot-and-mouth disease is making progress. Vaccination is said to have been completed in the buffer zone north of Patagonia, and in the province of La Pampa. In the province of Buenos Aires, from which most of the meat exported to this country is derived, about 80 per cent. of the cattle have been vaccinated. It is too early as yet to measure with any precision what has been the effect of this progress on the risk of infection being carried in meat shipped here from South America.

Sir A. Hurd: Does my right hon. Friend get the impression that this is really satisfactory progress and that the Argentine authorities are now really seriously tackling the problem of foot-and-mouth disease? Can the Minister say if any requests have been made to the research station at Pirbright for assistance in this matter?

Mr. Soames: Concerning the first part of my hon. Friends supplementary question, we all agree that considerable progress has been made in quite a short time in the Argentine. I cannot, however, answer the second part without notice.

Mr. Woodburn: Can the Minister say whether it is accepted that vaccination is now effective in this matter? Is he now prepared to authorise farmers in this country to use it?

Mr. Soames: There is no doubt that vaccination in a country the size of Argentine, with the number of outbreaks

of foot-and-mouth disease with which they have to contend—and the same applies in France—is most advantageous. But in a country such as ours, where the disease is not endemic and the number of outbreaks is comparatively small, by far the better means of control is slaughter, and that, indeed, is the point which many other countries would like to reach.

Plant Breeding (Research)

Mr. B. Harrison: asked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what arrangements exit whereby Government-financed plant-breeding stations make available their basic research results and material to plant breeders.

Mr. Vane: Research results are published in the reports of the institutes concerned and in appropriate scientific journals. The institutes are always ready to demonstrate their material, methods and results to plant breeders, to discuss problems and to give information and advice. Basic plant material which has been tested at the institutes is supplied to private plant breeders on request.

Mr. Harrison: While wishing to draw my right hon. Friend's attention to the co-operation that exists, may I ask him to make sure that viruses and diseases are also available at Government plant breeding establishments for private breeders?

Mr. Vane: I think I can assure my hon. Friend that we try to be as helpful and co-operative as possible, and, as far as disease-resistant cereals material is concerned, it is hoped that more will be released this autumn.

Mr. Farr: Would the hon. Gentleman not agree that this matter should perhaps be considered in the wider aspect of the Report of the findings of the Engholm Committee?

Mr. Vane: I hope my right hon. Friend will be able to make a statement on that shortly.

QUESTIONS TO MINISTERS

Mr. Strachey: Mr. Speaker, I rise to ask your guidance. In view of the fact that you were unable, no doubt on substantial grounds, to grant my request to


ask a Private Notice Question on what we consider to be the entirely unjustifiable decision of the Air Transport Advisory Committee on the Cunard Eagle application, may I have your guidance on the way in which we can raise in the House what we consider to be this most important and urgent matter?

Mr. Speaker: I can only say, most certainly not in that way. It is the practice of the House not to refer to Private Notice Questions which are not allowed. If the right hon. Gentleman would like to come and see me, I will try to help him to think about some way in which the matter could be raised, for instance, by putting an appropriate Motion on the Order Paper, but I should have to think about it.

Mr. Harold Davies: Mr. Harold Davies rose—

Sir A. V. Harvey: Sir A. V. Harvey rose—

Mr. Speaker: This is not a point of order. It never was one. We cannot discuss it.

Mr. Strachey: Mr. Speaker, may I have your assurance that on Thursday when we discuss the North Atlantic Shipping Bill, which has now become inextricably bound up with this matter, especially the financial aspect, it will be possible to raise this matter?

Mr. Speaker: So far as I remember, that Bill is at present in Committee and I do not carry in my mind the Amendments on which it might be suggested that the topic would be relevant. There is really no ground on which we can discuss this matter now.

Sir A. V. Harvey: With respect, Mr. Speaker, following the point raised by the right hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey), who sought your guidance, may I be allowed, with the greatest respect, to point out that if B.O.A.C. has said—

Hon. Members: No.

Mr. Speaker: Order. There can be no ground whatever for discussing the merits of this matter now.

Sir A. V. Harvey: You did say, Sir, that you would consider the matter.
May I be allowed to point out that the Corporation has intimated that it intends to lodge an appeal? If so, is not the matter sub judice?

Mr. Speaker: I quite understand that point. What I said was that if the right hon. Gentleman felt that he required my assistance I would consider with him what could be done. I was not for a moment suggesting that anything could be done while there was an appeal pending. It is really no good trying to discuss the point now.

Mr. Rankin: May we have your guidance on this point, Mr. Speaker? You have suggested that you would discuss with my right hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Strachey) whether some method could be adopted whereby the House might have a chance of discussing this matter. This is the point that is important to the House—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I am not here to give guidance. I am here to rule when some matter arises on which a Ruling is required. As a matter of courtesy, although I would not back myself against the wisdom of the right hon. Gentleman as to what can or cannot be done here, I did say that I would see him, if he wanted my help, and discuss the machinery of the matter. But there is really no ground for discussion.

Mr. P. Williams: On a separate point or order. Is it not an abuse of the House to seek to raise a matter of this nature when, in fact, an appeal is pending against a decision?

Mr. Speaker: What is wrong is to refer to a Private Notice Question that was not allowed. We got off on the wrong foot about it, and I hope that we can drop it.

Mr. Harold Davies: May I ask your guidance, Mr. Speaker, because it is relevant to the issue? Question No. 62 on the Order Paper is relevant to this problem. May the House know whether the Minister sought your permission to make a statement on that Question today?

Mr. Speaker: He did not.

NORTHERN RHODESIA (CONSTITUTION)

The Secretary of State for the Colonies (Mr. Iain Macleod): I will, with permission, make a statement on the Northern Rhodesia Constitution.
In my statement of 21st February I informed the House that I had asked the Governor to put forward recommendations after consultation with political groups in Northern Rhodesia on the matters which then remained to be settled. In order to fill in the details of a picture of which only a general outline had been given, I have now received the Governor's recommendations, and a White Paper containing the text of them is available in the Vote Office.
Hon. Members will wish to study this White Paper carefully. At the moment, I propose to confine myself to a summary of the Governor's main recommendations in respect of the more important matters which were left for settlement and Her Majesty's Government's view as to the advice which should be tendered to Her Majesty on these points.
As regards the elected membership of the Legislative Council, the Governor considers that the number of elected members should total 45, as suggested in the White Paper, composed of three equal groups of 15, the 15 members returned by the upper and lower rolls respectively to be elected in single-member constituencies covering the whole of the country.
As regards the third group of national members, he suggests that the simplest arrangement would be a pattern of seven double-member constituencies, perhaps combined with a separate single-member constituency. Her Majesty's Government accept the Governor's recommendation in respect of the upper and lower roll constituencies and in respect of the seven double-member constituencies.
As regards the suggested single-member constituency, we have decided that since the proposed arrangements do not provide an opportunity for the smaller racial communities who have their particular contribution to make to Northern Rhodesia, the Asian and Coloured communities throughout the whole territory should constitute a separate single-

member constituency and, consequently, those registered in this constituency will elect an Asian or Coloured candidate.
As regards the method of electing national members the Governor—and Her Majesty's Government agree with him—has come to the conclusion that the basis should be the equalisation of the two rolls as outlined in the White Paper, but he makes two suggestions to meet some of the criticisms he has received. First, he suggests that three or four of the seven double-member national constituencies should each return one African and one European member.
Her Majesty's Government accept this suggestion and consider that four of the seven double-member national constituencies should be reserved in this manner. Secondly, while endorsing the view of the White Paper that all candidates for national seats should be required to obtain a prescribed measure of minimum support, he suggests that the particular method envisaged in the White Paper might not, in practice, meet its object of compelling candidates to seek support from both races.
He therefore recommends that the minimum support required by a candidate in order to qualify for election should be expressed as l2½ per cent. or 400 votes, whichever is the less, of the European votes cast in the election, and 12½ per cent. or 400, whichever is the less, of the African votes cast in the election. Her Majesty's Government accept this recommendation, but also consider that candidates to qualify should obtain in addition at least 20 per cent. of the votes cast by one or other of the two rolls.
As regards the delimitation of constituencies, Her Majesty's Government agree with the Governor's conclusion that it would he desirable to appoint a delimitation commission under the chairmanship of a serving or retired judge.
On the franchise, the Governor's proposals provide for the increase of voters eligible for registration on the upper and lower rolls on the lines recommended in the White Paper. The Governor has reported to me that he has had representations favouring an increase in the number of Africans on the upper roll, but felt that in view of the terms of the White Paper he could not recommend


an increase beyond the figures of 1,500 to 2,000.
Her Majesty's Government nevertheless feel that an increase here would be justified, and, accordingly, I propose to ask the Governor to add categories to the upper roll which would enfranchise an additional 500 Africans beyond the numbers mentioned in the White Paper.
I am sure that the House will agree with me in paying tribute to the statesmanlike way in which Sir Evelyn Hone has discharged the difficult and burdensome responsibilities which we had placed upon him. Her Majesty's Government and all communities in the territory are deeply in his debt.
The recommendations he has put forward, with the amendments which Her Majesty's Government have made, accord fully with the objectives which have always governed our approach to this matter—that we should secure a substantially increased number of African members in the Legislative Council, while, at the same time, maintaining the principle of a non-racial political approach in which political parties are obliged to seek support from both races.

Mr. Callaghan: I associate myself with what the Colonial Secretary has said about the Governor, whose steadfastness in recent weeks has undoubtedly been an example to others who have been inclined to flap a little more readily.
Does not the statement which the right hon. Gentleman has just made—if the House will permit an inelegant expression—remind him of a dog's breakfast? Half seriously, I say to him that he ought to supply a slide rule to every elector if everyone is to understand what is proposed.
Will the right hon. Gentleman kindly explain—if it is possible to get it across—what he means in his statement by African voters and European voters? Surely, there is no such things. There is an upper roll and a lower roll. Can he explain how his reference to 12½ per cent. of African votes and European votes comes to be included, and what connection this has with the 20 per cent. minimum which the Government believe that people must have? I say, frankly, that I do not begin to understand it. Obviously, we shall need time—I hope

that the Government will provide time for a debate—so that we may understand these issues.
Does the Colonial Secretary realise just what difficulties one falls into when one departs from a simple statement such as that made by Monckton, that the object of this exercise is to provide a majority for the Africans in the Legislature, and that, if he had stuck to that, he would not have been involved in this tissue of nonsense, which will not stand up beyond one election even if it lasts so long?

Mr. Macleod: The hon. Gentleman seems to have changed his mind a good deal since we debated the White Paper. In fact, we have stuck with almost obstinate fidelity to the White Paper which we laid before the House.
If the hon. Gentleman will study carefully—I am sure he will—paragraphs 18 and 19 of the White Paper I have put before the House, he will see that we put two objectives there for the national seats, the whole objective of the national seats—I think it commanded the support of the House—being to have seats which would be won by moderate people whatever the colour of their faces might happen to be. We said there that we wanted to see a qualifying minimum percentage, which we regard as essential because, otherwise, a purely racial approach could be made, and also that support could be had from both races. If the hon. Gentleman will study the speech of the Leader of the Opposition in a short debate we had the next day, he will see that when talking of the qualifying minimum percentage he was referring entirely to race.
The position is that the two rolls are equalised for the purpose of the national seats, but, as the Governor points out, unless there is a qualifying minimum percentage on a basis of race it would be possible to reach it without producing a single Member in one case of the other race. Therefore, though the basic principle remains of the appeal to the two rolls and the equalisation of the two rolls—the hon. Gentleman will, I think, fairly easily be able to do his sums in regard to that—it is necessary, for the qualifying minimum percentage, to do it in terms of race.
I fully acknowledge the complexity of the scheme, but, after all, if one is trying


to have not just a parity scheme but a parity scheme plus the addition of a block of seats which are won, and which can only be won, because of the qualifying percentage, by those of moderate views, it is necessary to import a good deal of complexity.

Mr. Callaghan: Will the Colonial Secretary explain what relation the 20 per cent. minimum bears to the 12½ per cent. minimum? How does he justify this as a non-racial approach, when what he has done is to ensure that more Europeans and Africans are elected as such in the national constituencies and that an Asian is elected or, at any rate, that Asian interests are represented?

Mr. Macleod: I am sorry; I forgot the point about the 20 per cent. If one had just 12½ per cent. alone, it would then be possible, for example, for somebody who got, shall we say, 13 per cent. of each race to qualify and to beat someone whose vote was very much higher. We thought that we should add the small additional hurdle that, on either roll but not both, a candidate would have to reach a figure of 20 per cent.

Mr. Callaghan: What happens if no one does?

Mr. Macleod: If no one reaches it—the question of frustration is dealt with in paragraph 10 of his report—the Governor recommends that there should be one by-election in the same circumstances and that, if after that nobody reaches the qualification, the seat should remain unfilled.

Mr. Turton: Can my right hon. Friend say on what argument he bases the claim that this solution follows the principles laid down in the Lennox-Boyd Constitution of 1958? Can he deny that that 1958 Constitution was far less racial in character in relation to representation than this solution?

Mr. Macleod: No, I cannot accept that. If my right hon. Friend will refer to the Northern Rhodesia White Paper of 1958, he will see it clearly laid down there that it must be necessary for Africans to elect with their votes an African and for Europeans to elect with their votes a European. I should not say that this is in any way a more racial approach than that of 1958. Indeed, I

think that it is closely linked to that approach.

Mr. Grimond: Will the Colonial Secretary agree that this is a very complicated Constitution, especially coming from a Government who have always said that any type of electoral reform in this country would be too difficult for the electorate to understand?
As regards the seven double-member constituencies, I gather that four are to elect one European and one African. I do not know what is to happen to the other three, and I should be glad if the right hon. Gentleman would explain that. Secondly, though I quite understand that he wants a non-racial approach, the majority Report of the Monckton Commission made quite clear that in its view the only Constitution which would work in Northern Rhodesia was one which allowed Africans at least the chance of electing an African majority. Can the right hon. Gentleman tell the House whether his proposals would allow the Africans to elect an African majority, were they so minded?

Mr. Macleod: Yes; the two questions are, in a sense, one. Six of the 14 seats are unreserved and anybody can put up any candidate at all there, either African or European. It is, therefore, implicit in that that these proposals could produce either a European or an African majority.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: Is this to be an imposed Constitution which it is expected will be opposed formally or otherwise by the United National Independence Party or the United Federal Party?

Mr. Macleod: I do not know yet. Each Constitution of the last six has been imposed. I hope that one will receive a measure of support for this Constitution, but, of course, it is too early to tell.

Mr. Brockway: The right hon. Gentle-may said that the Governor had discussed these proposals with representatives of the parties, and the right hon. Gentleman himself has discussed them in London. Will he inform the House how far the various parties in Northern Rhodesia support these proposals and how far his statement is an agreed statement?

Mr. Macleod: Obviously, I cannot, because, naturally, it is my duty to inform the House of Commons first. The parties in Lusaka will not be aware until now—they will be told at once by the Governor—of the proposals I have put before the House.

Mr. Wall: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on achieving a solution within the terms of the White Paper, which should satisfy all political parties in Northern Rhodesia. I have two questions to put to him.
First, who is to decide—and on what basis—which of the middle roll seats will return an African and a European and which will return two members of any race? Secondly, in order to make the system rather more simple in providing for how the middle roll is to return 14 plus one for the minorities, would it not be better to have a combination of three 14s rather than three 15s?

Mr. Macleod: The Governor recommends that the three-15 system should be maintained. I do not think that he found serious opposition to that from the parties in Lusaka. So far as the detailed questions of delimitation are concerned, we thought the best thing to do was to appoint a Delimitation Commission, as I have said, under the chairmanship of a judge. Although one cannot undertake to do so, I am sure that his recommendations on the sort of matters which my hon. Friend mentioned would be accepted.

Mr. Gaitskell: The right hon. Gentleman will appreciate how difficult it is for us to grasp, from his statement, exactly how the national roll will work out. I should like to ask him three questions, the first a very simple one. When will the Delimitation Commission conclude its work, because it is obviously of major importance? Secondly, can he say whether there will now be a necessity for registering either as Europeans or Africans or Asians—the third category? Thirdly, will he arrange—and perhaps this is already taken care of—that in a White Paper or in some other way a series of illustrations and examples could be produced, as, for example, in bridge problems, in dealing with which the right hon. Gentleman is so adept?

Mr. Macleod: That seems to me where I came in. I cannot give a precise time

for the work of the Delimitation Commission. We will have to draw up terms of reference. All I can say is that the administrative work that is inevitable will follow as quickly as possible. I am told that with the exception of registering Asians it will not be necessary under this system to have racial registration.

Mr. Callaghan: How does the right hon. Gentleman know?

Mr. Macleod: This is what I am told by the Governor. I will certainly consider arranging illustrations of how this scheme will work out.
I would make this simple point. It seemed to me that from the beginning there were three key objectives in the White Paper. First, the basic point that the rolls should be equalised for the national seats. Secondly, that there should be a qualifying minimum percentage throughout all the seats. Thirdly, that an appeal should be made to people of both the main races. This scheme—and I acknowledge its complexity—at least does all these three things, and, therefore, follows faithfully the White Paper which was put before the House.

Mr. Biggs-Davison: In all these complexities, is not what really matters the strength and prosperity of the Federation as a united non-racial State? May I ask the Colonial Secretary, now that he has laid his White Paper, whether Her Majesty's Government will do their best to expedite the Exchequer loan to the Federation, which many people think has been unreasonably delayed?

Mr. Macleod: I assure my hon. Friend that there is no connection whatever between those two matters. It does not arise out of my statement, but I give him that assurance. I think that these matters are more or less finalised now.

Mr. Callaghan: Is there a mistake in the Colonial Secretary's original statement? He has just told us, in answer to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, that there is no need to register as Europeans or as Africans. Did not his statement say that it would be necessary to get 12½ per cent. of the European votes cast in the election or 12½ per cent., or 400, of the African votes cast in the election? How will they know which are African and which are


European votes unless the people are registered as Europeans or Africans?
May I ask him whether he is aware that most of us regard Federal influence in this matter as being most baleful and completely unproductive of any lasting settlement?

Mr. Macleod: I do not subscribe to that last view at all. I have no complaint to make of the very proper interest which the Federal Government have throughout shown. Sir Roy Welensky is a man who fights his corner firmly. Every single line of this is in accordance with the White Paper, with one exception, which is the addition of 500 Africans to the upper roll. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is objecting to this. I discussed racial registration with the Governor. It would be necessary to register the Asians of the Colony, but I am told that if that is done there is no need to have an additional registration of Europeans and Africans, who would merely be handed different forms at the polling booth.

Several Hon. Members: Several Hon. Members rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. We cannot pursue this matter now.

Orders of the Day — ARMY AND AIR FORCE (RECOMMITTED) BILL

Considered in Committee [Progress, 2nd May].

[Sir GORDON TOUCHE in the Chair]

Clause 8.—(TERMS OF ENLISTMENT IN REGULAR AIR FORCE.)

3.56 p.m.

The Chairman: The first Amendment selected is that in the name of the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin), in page 8, line 36, and it may be convenient to the Committee to discuss with it the later Amendments in the name of the same hon. Member in page 9, line 4, to leave out paragraphs (a) and (b) and to insert:
the date of his attestation or his eighteenth birthday, whichever be later, and in the case of women—the date of attestation.
and that in page 9, line 9, to leave out subsection (5).

Mr. John Cronin: I beg to move, in page 8, line 36, at the end to insert:
or
(d)in the case of women enlisting in the regular air force a term not exceeding six years as may be prescribed, being a term of air force service.
I think that it might be convenient also to discuss the Amendment following this Amendment, also in my name, to leave out lines 37 to 42, if that is agreeable to you, Sir Gordon.

The Chairman: So be it.

Mr. Cronin: We are placed in some difficulty, because that Amendment goes with the first two Amendments on the Notice Paper, to lines 15 and 24, to leave out "term" and insert "long term enlistment", which are not selected.

The Chairman: Those Amendments are not selected, because they were discussed previously on Clause 3.

Mr. Cronin: I move this Amendment with some brevity, and will speak briefly to the three Amendments concerned. As we know, the Government got themselves into serious difficulties the last time that we discussed the Bill and on this occasion we are very anxious to


help them. We want to expedite the passage of the Bill in every possible way, so if we speak with a good deal more brevity than on the last occasion it will not be for any lack of ceremony or any lack of desire to go into these matters very thoroughly, but simply to expedite business, in view of the Government's previous difficulties.
This is purely a drafting Amendment, as are the other Amendments which we are now discussing. They have been drafted by the fertile pen of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget), and we think that they are a considerable improvement on the drafting in the Bill as it stands. We have a great respect for the Government's draftsmen, but we feel that on this occasion their drafting is somewhat cumbersome and tautological, and that nothing would be lost in clarity if the Amendment were accepted.

Mr. R. T. Paget: I want to add very little indeed to what my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) has said. I am not clear about the first two Amendments, which are not selected, and the Amendment to leave out lines 37 to 42. Those lines certainly could not be done unless something were put in their place. What is proposed in the first two Amendments which are not selected is what I suggest should be put in the place of the six lines which. I suggest should be omitted. In other words, what I am saying is that six words should take the place of six lines. But the Amendment in page 8, to leave out lines 37 to 42, does not make sense without the Amendments in page 8, lines 15 and 24.

4.0 p.m.

The Chairman: The Amendments in page 8, lines 15 and 24 and the Amendment in page 8 to leave out lines 37 to 42 were not selected.

Mr. Paget: I am sorry. I thought that the Amendment to leave out lines 37 to 42 was selected.

The Chairman: The hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) wished to refer to the Amendment to leave out lines 37 to 42, and I said that I had no objection to that.

Mr. Paget: I am sorry. I had not followed that.
It cannot be disputed that my suggestion would entail far fewer and more easily comprehensible words than those of the Clause. Why do the words which I suggest have a different effect from that of the words in the Clause?

Mr. George Wigg: I am at a loss to know what we are discussing, but, in an endeavour to come to grips with the matter, may I say that I have studied the Amendments and that I should like to ask one or two questions of my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) on them.
What I cannot understand is why a distinction should be drawn between men and women in relation to these engagements. It is clear that, if the Amendments are carried, the term of the engagement of a man could date either from the date of attestation or from his birthday, whereas the term of engagement of a woman can date only from the date of attestation. Why such a distinction should be introduced, I do not know. It is a new principle. Possibly there is a hidden reason for it.
I have always understood, ever since the controversy over terms of service started about ten years ago, that a short-term engagement is one thing, with a minor qualification as far as the Army is concerned, and a long-term engagement another. If the Amendments are carried, it will leave the matter in the air. If the proposal is accepted, the words "in the said sections" in the last line on page 8, will be in complete isolation.
I wonder whether my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough can explain why this new principle has been introduced to differentiate between men and women concerning the date of attestation, why the evaluation of the long-term engagement has been altered and to which sections the words "in the said sections" refer.

Mr. Cronin: I think that it would be beneficial if we heard what the Under-Secretary of State had to say about this before we went any further.

The Under-Secretary of State for Air (Mr. W. J. Taylor): As I see it, the Amendments make one change of substance. As the Clause is at present worded, women under the age of 18 may


enlist either for a term running from their eighteenth birthday or for a term of up to six years running from the date of attestation. Under the Amendment the engagement would always run from the date of attestation. In practice, this probably would not matter very much—

Mr. Wigg: With respect, it would make one very important difference. If women serving a long-term engagement can join at 17 years, it will very seriously affect their pension rights.

Mr. Taylor: That is so. But most are likely to come under these terms, anyway. If a girl has in mind a long-term career in the Women's Royal Air Force, it will be in her interest to enlist on an engagement which runs from her eighteenth birthday, since service under the age of 18 does not count for pension. The engagement running from the eighteenth birthday is a new concession for recruits under 18 years. There is no particular reason why it should be restricted to men. That is the view that we take in this Bill.
I think that to some extent the other Amendments are a matter of taste. The definition of the relative date from which a term of enlistment is reckoned saves words, but it does not make the Clause simpler. I think that this was the point which the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) made. The present wording gives separate definitions for people enlisting over the age of 18 and for people enlisting under the age of 18. Therefore, a man can pick out the definition which applies to him and learn directly what the relative date means in relation to his own engagement. With the amended form of words, he would have to work it out from an omnibus definition. Obviously this would not matter very much, but we think that it would be a disadvantage to a man in looking up his own case.
The proposal to roll up the special subsection about women raises much the same considerations. Under the Bill women can enlist on any of the engagements concerning periods of service open to men. In addition, as I have said, women under 18 can come in on engagements of up to six years running from the date of attestation. Since this will now be a special provision applicable

only to women and will probably cover the bulk of Women's Royal Air Force recruiting, it seems sensible to us to put it in a subsection of its own where anyone to whom it applies can readily find it.
For all these reasons, we much prefer to leave the Clause as it stands, and I ask the Committee to reject the Amendment.

Mr. Cronin: As the Under-Secretary of State said, this is purely a matter of taste. No great point of substance is involved. I therefore beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: I beg to move, in page 9, line 2, to leave out from "the" to the end of line 3 and insert "said section fifteen".
This is a drafting Amendment. Section 15 is specifically referred to in line 38 on page 8 of the Bill. It is, therefore, necessary to insert the words "said section fifteen" in line 2, on page 9 and to leave out the words:
section of this Act relating to persons therein referred to as existing airmen. …

Mr. Cronin: My hon. Friends and I agree entirely with the Amendment.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 9.—(CHANGE OF CONDITIONS OF SERVICE AFTER LONG-TERM ENLISTMENT IN REGULAR AIR FORCE.)

Mr. Paget: I beg to move, in page 9, line 31, to leave out "fifty-five" and insert "sixty".
This is an Amendment of some substance and one about which those approaching the limit of 55 years, perhaps, feel a little sensitive. I do not feel that I shall be unemployable for every conceivable purpose in two or three years and I do not see why the Royal Air Force should take that view. I do not suggest that in a general way airmen should serve up to the age of 60, but I feel that there are exceptional cases in which the man concerned may wish to continue his service and that the Air Force may have a use for him. Therefore, why not take the power to enable him to continue his service?

Mr. Cronin: I support my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget). It seems to me quite unnecessary that airmen should be obliged to quit the Service at the age of 55, as the Clause seems to indicate. In these days, there have been tremendous advances in medical knowledge and, in consequence, people keep their mental and physical fitness much longer. Again, work in the Royal Air Force is much less arduous in many respects than in the other Services. It may involve a good deal of mental strain, but not so much physical strain. For instance, much of it is of a technical nature.
It is a little unreasonable that an airman who might be skilled in repairing the radar apparatus in the nose-cone of a Bloodhound should cease to be skilled officially as soon as he has passed his fifty-fifth birthday and should, therefore, have to leave the Service. There is a real danger of losing highly-skilled personnel, particularly those engaged in the technical and equipment branches, if the Amendment is not accepted. I appreciate that there might be occasions when it may be desirable to get rid of a person who is not doing his work as well as he could do. It might be embarrassing sometimes in the case of a senior N.C.O. or warrant officer, but there ought to be some other way of getting round the difficulty than by imposing this age limit of 55.
I believe that there are certain circumstances in which an airman or N.C.O. can stay on beyond the age of 55. If the Under-Secretary of State will tell us something about those circumstances, it might go some way to assauging our difficulties. In the meantime, however, I should like him to give the matter careful consideration and to give us the full reasons why 55 is a more agreeable age than 60.

Mr. Wigg: I would point out to my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) that what the Clause refers to is the term of enlistment under the Clause. If my hon. Friend turns over two pages to Clause 12, he will find what happens to an airman when he has gone beyond twenty-two years. I understand the technical term better in connection with the Army, but at the end of his long-term enlistment the man

then continues in the Service. Clause 12 deals with continuance of Regular airmen in the Service after the expiration of their term and there is no limit whatever on the age.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: I assure the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) and his hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin) that the Air Council is in no way less sympathetic towards the serving man who approaches the age of 55. As I shall show, the Air Council has power to extend the period of service in certain circumstances.
First, I should like to explain the reasons which have influenced us in fixing 55 as the normal retiring age of airmen. There are two main considerations which limit the age to which we can extend a man's service. The first of these is the age structure of the Service as a whole. All I need say on this is that we have to make sure that we avoid a policy which will leave us with an undue proportion of elderly men in the Service at any date.
The second thing to be borne in mind is the need to provide attractive prospects of advancement to young men and to the recruits of the future. This consideration clearly places a limit on the length of time for which we allow airmen to hold the most senior ranks, otherwise we should have promotion blockages affecting airmen at the bottom of the ladder and this would be bound to react unfavourably on recruitment. These are the difficulties which we have to consider in connection with our desire to offer a full and attractive career. We have concluded that 55 is the maximum age to which the full career airman can normally be retained.
4.15 p.m.
I do not see any prospect of increasing the age generally. This does not mean that we cannot make exceptions to keep individual airmen beyond the age of 55 if a man is fit and willing to serve on after that age. If we still want him, he can continue in service at the end of his engagement at three months' notice for an indefinite period. This provision is contained in Clause 12, to which the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) referred.
Our position on the Amendment, therefore, is that while there can be no question of a general increase in the retiring age of airmen, for the reasons which I


have stated, the Bill gives us the authority which we need to make exceptions and to continue individual airmen in the Service up to any age. The Amendment would serve no useful purpose and I must ask the Committee to reject it.

Mr. E. Shinwell: I have some difficulty in following the arguments adduced by the Under-Secretary of State and by the reference to Clause 12 by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg). If Clause 12 means that by making a submission to his commanding officer and giving him the requisite three months' notice, an airman can continue in the service, obviously even the age of 60 does not apply. I do not know whether it means that by making the necessary submission and giving the requisite three months' notice, an airman can go on to the age of 70 or 75. There must be an arbitrary date when he is called upon to retire and he can be no longer retained in the Service.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: There is no arbitrary date. It is a question of the good judgment of the Air Council in this matter as to whether there is use for the man for an extended period, always assuming that the man wants to continue. It is a perfectly reasonable arrangement that after the statutory age, as it were, of 55, either side should be able to go on at three months' notice.

Mr. Shinwell: That is merely theory. Everybody knows that it conflicts with the practice. Obviously, when an airman reaches the ages of 55 or 60, as the case may be, and certainly not later, in the opinion of the Air Council and of his superior officers the time has come for him to retire.
I am concerned about one aspect of the problem which came to my notice in a formidable fashion when I was engaged in the administrative side of this affair, not in the Air Force, but in the Army, when I was Under-Secretary. I refer to the difficulty that applies in the case of men who are called upon to retire at what I regard as the comparatively early age of 55 or 60, when it is impossible for them to obtain any alternative employment. Their pension is not particularly extravagant and men of that age are often in the prime of life, but when they are looking around for

employment and give their age as 55, 58 or 60, as the case may be, they are told that they are much too old, and they are out on a limb. It is very bad for men of that age not to be usefully employed.
The Under-Secretary referred to exceptional cases in which the Air Council can decide whether a man should remain in the Service. I gather, however, that there is no provision of this nature in the Bill, apart from Clause 12, which is very much in the air.

Mr. Wigg: Mr. Wigg rose—

Mr. Shinwell: Let me complete the sentence, otherwise it will be misunderstood.
Unless there is some provision in the Bill agreeing that the man should continue until the age of 60, when, I think, it would be reasonable, in the circumstances, to ask him to retire from the Service, I am bound to support the Amendment.

Mr. Wigg: My right hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) fails to understand that there is a great deal of difference between the re-engagement and pensionable engagement in the Army and the Royal Air Force now, and the period about which he was talking.
To go back to pre-war days when my right hon. Friend was Under-Secretary of State for War, as I have said on a number of occasions, a man enlisted in the Army always for twelve years, partly with the Colours and partly with the Reserve, without any claim for pension at all. In his ninth year, when he could be promoted to the rank of sergeant, a man could claim to re-engage.
In the Air Force the peculiar structure of the Service makes it necessary to limit the number of people engaged in a particular trade. I remember the time when only a handful of men were engaged in mechanical transport and after a twelve-year engagement, out they would go. Only in the Army could a soldier re-engage with establish pensionable rights. The long service engagement gave the soldier the right of a pension from enlisting. He could undertake an engagement of twenty-two years if he wished, and at the moment of joining he was entitled to a pension.


The Air Force authorities, in their wisdom, have now come along with a similar proposal for the Air Force.
If it is proposed to introduce the right for a man to stay on for a period of twenty-two years, it is necessary to consider the structure of the Service, otherwise we should have an Army or an Air Force composed of "greybeards". If my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) will look at Clause 9, he will see that we are discussing a long-term engagement and enlistment under the provisions in that Clause, that is to say, the right of a man to engage for twenty-two years. The man can continue to serve until he is 55 years of age and then in the majority of cases he will finish.
Clause 12 says that a man who has entered on a long-term engagement can in the last year of his service, give notice to his commanding officer that he wishes to continue in the Service, and the competent Air Force authority will consider the rights of the man, on the one hand, and the needs of the Service, on the other. It can permit the man to continue to serve for as long as the needs of the Air Force allow.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Easington cannot apply his judgment of events of twenty years ago to the position today because, even until the passing of this Bill, a man had no such right. But now he is to have the absolute right to engage for twenty-two years and finish at the age of 55 or, if he wishes to continue, to give notice to his commanding officer. In the Army, the reference is to the commanding officer. The Air Force is even more careful, and refers to the competent Air Force authority. I dare say that would mean the officer-in-charge of records, who would hold the balance.

Mr. Shinwell: What is the purpose of subsection (2, a), in Clause 9, where there is a reference to attaining the age of 55 years? Is it necessary to include this provision in view of what my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has said about Clause 12?

Mr. Wigg: My right hon. Friend has asked me a question. I assume that this paragraph has been inserted in the Bill because the Air Force cannot afford—certainly the Army could not afford—

to give people such a statutory right. If we had an infantry regiment in which all the warrant officers had the right to stay on in the Service beyond the age of 55, obviously it would impair the efficiency of the force.
The Air Force has a different problem from that of the Army. It is an overall problem rather than a regimental problem. It gives the man a statutory right regarding the length of his engagement and then tells him that he may apply in the last year if his service to extend his service and the competent Air Force authority will make a decision. This brings the Air Force, rather belatedly, into line with the Army.

Mr. Paget: We have had some extremely interesting speeches and my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has been given the opportunity to display his great expertise. But it seems to me that none of the speeches has had anything whatever to do with the Amendment. The proposal contained in the Amendment would not interfere with the age structure of the Air Force. Everybody understands that. Its purpose is not to make the regular retiring age 60 instead of 55.
The Clause states, in subsection (2), that
Where a person in air-force service enlisted as aforesaid his conditions of service may, on written application in that behalf made by him to his commanding officer and with the consent of the competent air-force authority …
That gives discretion to the competent Air Force authority as to whether the man can continue at all or for how long. In its wisdom the authority may think that a man should not serve beyond the age of 55.
In an exceptional case, when the authority decided to make the term of service longer, it might be that a mere three months' notice would not be suitable for the purpose. Some highly technical jobs could be done by old men. They may be jobs in which age and experience may be an advantage. There may be cases in which a man may want to know that he has a job for a certain period, and three months' notice may not be satisfactory to him. Even more so, it may not be satisfactory to the Air Force. In a particular job, requiring a particular expertise, training or experience, the Air Force may wish to rely


on being staffed-up. The Service may want to have people on which it knows it can rely to serve for a certain period. Why should the hands of the competent authority be tied?
To accept the Amendment would commit the Air Force to nothing at all. It would simply widen the discretion to deal with the exceptional and not the general case. I suggest that the Amendment is reasonable.

4.30 p.m.

Mr. Michael Foot: I have listened very carefully to the speeches which have been made on this Amendment. We have heard two experts on the subject, my right hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) and my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg).

Mr. Wigg: I would not put myself quite in the class of my right hon. Friend, because I generally get my facts right.

Mr. Foot: I was about to pay my hon. Friend that compliment. It would have come better from me, perhaps, than from him. All of us in these debates, particularly the Minister, wait to hear what my hon. Friend has to say, because he can usually explain a Clause better than can the Minister himself. I must confess, having listened to what the Minister said and what my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley said, that I was not quite sure they were saying the same thing.
My hon. Friend is now saying that Clause 12 gives some mitigation of the position under Clause 9, but I was not quite clear that that was exactly the same claim made for the Clause and the present position by the Minister. I listened to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget), who said that the Clause did not commit the Air Force to keeping anyone in the Air Force longer than it wished. If that is the case under the Clause, I cannot see why it should not be accepted. If it is not the case, it alters what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley.
For us amateurs in these matters it might be of assistance if we could be given a few figures showing what happens now. How many are there in the Air Force who reach the age of 55, who

wish to stay on, but who are denied by the authorities the right to do so? If we were told those figures we might be able to form some judgment whether it is desirable to alter the present position and whether the Clause alters it in the way in which we should wish. If there are very few cases where it arises that a person wants to stay on after 55 we are asking about not very much. Alternatively, it could be argued that if only a few who reach 55 wish to stay on and are denied the right because the matter has been referred to commanding officers 01 the Air Council, it might be perfectly reasonable to slay that we should give the choice to the man as well as to the Air Council. I do not see why we should not do that.
There is another conflict of evidence between two whom I never like to see fall out, my right hon. Friend the Member for Easington and my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley. My right hon. Friend said that there are very few who want to stay on after 55 and who are denied the right to do so, but my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley takes the view that this proposal would disrupt the whole Air Force. Who is right? I cannot see whether we shall have enlightenment from the Minister about who is correct. It would be easier for those who wish to know whether they should support the Amendment or not if we could know how many wish to stay on after 55 and are denied the right to do so. Then we could consider if it would not be more just—particularly in view of the difficulties for people of 55 to get another job—to waive the matter and give them the choice of deciding, instead of having the matter absolutely under the decision of the Air Ministry. That, I understand, under the arrangement of the Clause without the Amendment would be the position.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: The very expert exposition of the existing legislation given by the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) could, not be bettered by any Minister, I am grateful to, him for putting it better than I could put it. He asked about "the competent Air Force authority". That would be the Air Member of Council for Personnel. It would be at that level.
On the question raised by the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. M. Foot)


about the numbers, I am sorry that I have not figures available, but I think that they would be extremely small. The essential point is that Clause 12 allows us to be selective. The hon. Member for Dudley explained that it allows the Air Ministry to hold the balance at the time according to the requirements in any particular trade or section of the Service. If the Amendment is to mean anything at all—and here I take issue with the right hon. Member for Essington (Mr. Shinwell)—it means that an airman is to be engaged to 60 at a much earlier stage. It must mean that. For the reasons I have explained, we could not accept that if we altered the three months' notice under Clause 12 it would not create difficulties.

Mr. Cronin: I do not think that the hon. Gentleman quite understands the position. A man may be retained until he is 60 only with the consent of "the competent Air Force authority".

Mr. Taylor: I have dealt with that point. When an application was received it would be dealt with in the organisation. Responsibility for the ultimate decision rests on the Air Member of Council for Personnel.
The three months' notice under Clause 12 does not in fact create difficulty. Acceptance of the Amendment might not commit the Air Force to anything, indeed it would provide us with a power that we should not normally want to use. It would give the impression that the normal retiring age was 60. For all these reasons, we feel that it would be unwise to accept the Amendment.
The hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) said, in I think as many words, that the Amendment would commit the Air Council to nothing at all. That is true, but we feel that the present legislation is adequate to deal with a situation which is not very demanding. I have been advised, since I spoke of the numbers, that the number of men applying for continuation of service beyond 55 is very small indeed. I repeat that the approval depends not only on a man's fitness but on his desire to continue in a particular trade or rank.

Mr. Paget: The Minister does not seem to follow what the Amendment

would do. A man enters on a long term of service. That cannot take him beyond 55, but at the end of it new circumstances may arise. There may be a special department or a special craft for which people are being trained and for which the Air Force has a continuing, but limited, requirement. It wants to be sure of having that craft available for a certain number of jobs which could be done by keeping a limited number of men until they are 60. In those circumstances, to take them on on a three months' engagement might leave the Service short of a particular craft which was vital, but only for a limited period, and would make the training of young men for that craft uneconomic and unnecessary. Those are the sort of circumstances I envisage.
Why should the Air Force tie its hands in this way? The Minister has admitted that the Amendment would not commit it to anything. I cannot conceive that anyone could imagine that the Air Force considers its discretion to keep people in certain circumstances up to a certain age as a right and a policy generally to keep them until that age. This is a discretionary power which might arise only occasionally. There are various crafts for which there is a requirement. One might see a requirement coming which will end at a specific date. It might be uneconomic to train people to do it when the older men can do it.

Mr. Wigg: I must be careful how I handle this matter, in view of the friendly references made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) to my expertise. I offer the excuse that I have been through all these phases with members of my family. I know the heartbreak which can be caused to people by things in regulations which one can never hope to achieve.
The Army and the Air Force have given a man the right to go on for twenty-two years, and they say that, overall, he can stay until he is 55. This limit of age has always been there. It goes back to the beginning of the century and before. If the Under-Secretary of State were ill-advised enough, and disregarded the needs of his Service enough, and listened to my hon. and learned Friend—even assuming that my hon. and learned Friend is right, which


he is not—and accepted his argument—which is a purely legal one and above my head—he would affect the overall structure of the Air Force and of the Army. En effect, the chopper would have to come down either on the exercise of the competent Air Force authority under Clause 9 or it would have to be left to Clause 12, because this would be neither the rule nor the exception.
The Royal Air Force has gone a long way from the time when there was a limited number of people it could take, and the realities of the administrative structure are expressed in this legislative reform. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will stay true to truth and reality and not listen to this siren song which, even if my hon. and learned Friend became Secretary of State, would he meaningless and would be bound to bring unhappiness and disappointment to a great number of chaps, who might believe that they were expected to go on while the Secretary of State knew that there would be no vacancies for them in twenty years' time.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: The hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) has put a plausible case, but I shall not fall for it. Service beyond the age of 55 must still continue to be regarded as a special case designed to fill particular vacancies which may exist at any particular time. I cannot move from that position. The Air Council must be given authority to use its own discretion in this matter, and, therefore, I hope that the Committee will reject the Amendment.

Amendment negatived.

Mr. Cronin: I beg to move, in page 9, line 43, to leave out from "person" to "in" in line 44.
This is not an Amendment of great substance and I do not propose to dilate upon it. All of us, on both sides of the Committee, are entirely sympathetic with the object of Clause 9 (4). It is obviously undesirable that an airman or N.C.O. who is undergoing an expensive or complicated course should leave it before it is completed and waste the money and time involved, but this Amendment would increase the discretion of the competent Air Force authority. This is a matter which is obviously of convenience

to the Air Ministry, and I cannot imagine that the Under-Secretary of State will find great difficulty in accepting it.

4.45 p.m.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: I am very glad on this occasion to be able to accommodate the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin). The four-year proviso was put in in the interests of individual airmen, so that they should not be induced to extend their period of committed service at too early a stage. However, there will be a further rule that the period of additional service needed as a qualification in these cases should not have exceeded six years.
Since the prescribed courses of instruction for which this further commitment would be needed are never likely to last for much more than two years, it follows that it will be virtually impossible for the man with less than four years' service to commit himself beyond the twelve-year maximum proposed in Clause 9 (1). The value of the four-year rule is, therefore, minimal. If it is the feeling of the Committee, I shall be very glad to accept the Amendment.

Mr. Cronin: On behalf of this side of the Committee, I want to say how glad we are that the hon. Gentleman has accepted the Amendment. It is not a concession of a most sweeping nature, but we are nevertheless thankful for this small mercy and express the hope that this liberality will continue.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause, as amended, ordered w stand part of the Bill.

Clause 10.—(CONVERSION OF SHORT-TERM ENLISTMENT IN REGULAR AIR FORCE INTO LONGE-TERM ENLISTMENT.)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the Clause stand part of the Bill.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I do not think we should pass this Clause without a certain amount of questioning and criticism. Very young persons are to be called upon to enlist under the age of 21 for considerable periods. These persons are far too young to undertake these long-term agreements. For example, we are told that,
A person shall not give notice … before attaining the age of seventeen years and six months.


That is too young.
A young person under the age of 21 should not be called upon to undertake a long-term agreement such as twenty-two years in the Royal Air Force. I wonder how many young people seriously sit down and plan their lives twenty-two years ahead in such an institution as the Royal Air Force. The character of the Service, and the background to it, must change perpetually as the years go on. What is likely to happen to the Royal Air Force in the next twenty-two years? We know of the great scientific advances being made. The kind of aircraft which will be flying in four or five years time, let alone in twenty-two years time, will be very different from the type of aircraft flying today. I suggest that, by a series of specious advertisements and promises of security, the Air Ministry is attracting young men into an occupation which might be a dead-end occupation.
I know that many young people are being asked to undertake this commitment without having any real understanding of what it involves. Very plausible Royal Air Force recruiting officers visit some schools and hold out prospects of early retirement with special pensions and bonuses, so attracting young people from other professions. These officers have gone to secondary schools in my part of the world and have enticed into the Royal Air Force young people who are needed for our teaching profession.
It is far more necessary to attract young people to take up scientific careers than to go into the Royal Air Force, because it is more likely to be an advantage to themselves and to the nation. If the Air Force changes during the next four or five years, as is likely, with the advance of science, the country may have to provide some kind of compensation. We are in danger of making the Air Force too attractive, in contrast with careers in education or in industry. As a result, young people could be persuaded to take up what may prove to be a dead-end occupation when they could much better have devoted their services, youth and intelligence to a more productive form of national activity.

Mr. Wigg: My hon. Friend seems to have failed to appreciate that the Clause

does not deal with people who are in school, or are likely to have a career in the Air Force put forward to them as an attractive proposition. It refers to people who are already serving in the Royal Air Force. A man serving a 12-year engagement would not add anything to that engagement by taking advantage of these provisions; all that he would do would be to qualify for a pension. These provisions are inserted in the interests of the man.
It is true that a young man serving a short-service engagement and then converting it into a 22-year engagement would have the added liability of carrying on for a further twelve years, but he could break his engagement at twelve years, which he could have done in any case. I should have thought that my hon. Friend would have had nothing against the Clause. There is no question of young people being told a story and persuaded to join, and then finding the conditions to be very different from what they thought. In this case the man would have had a bite at the cake; he would have liked it, and would have asked for more. In those circumstances, I cannot see why my hon. Friend is against the Clause.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: The remarks of the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) merit a brief reply. The man who converts to a 22-year engagement when under the age of 21 will always have had less than four years' service. He is not the person at school; he is already in the Service. What he is seeking at this point is security. He wants to provide himself with a good career, with a pension at the end of it. He does this deliberately. He can break his service again later in his career if he so desires.
If he converts to a long-term engagement he will have his right to break his service before the 12-year point, under the provisions of Clause 9 (1). If he is already serving a 12-year engagement there is no further commitment for service on his part, but he gains the promise of a career with a pension if he elects to stay on beyond the option point. That is a pure advantage to him. The man converting to a 22-year engagement from one of less than twelve years may commit himself to twelve years, but he could equally do that from the age of 17½, by


enlisting or converting to a normal 12-year engagement. The main difference if he takes on the long-term engagement is the prospect of a pension. The hon. Member's argument has no validity.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 11 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 12.—(CONTINUANCE IN SERVICE IN REGULAR AIR FORCE AFTER EXPIRATION OF TERM.)

Mr. Paget: I beg to move, in page 12, line 18, after "continued" to insert:
for the period requested in the application or for such less period as the competent air force authority may approve".
The object of this Amendment is similar to that of the last one I moved. It gives discretion to the provisions contained in the Clause, to extend not merely on a three-months' to three-months' basis but for a definite period, should that suit the convenience both of the Air Force and the man concerned. It is purely discretionary. The man need not ask for a definite period, and the Air Force may not want a definite period. I should have thought that there were circumstances in which it might be convenient to both to have a definite period of extension.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: As the Clause stands, a man continues to serve for an indefinite period. He can take his discharge at any time by giving three months' notice, and the Air Force can discharge him at any time with full terminal leave, and so on. The Amendment would provide for the continuance for a fixed period only, subject to the man's right to take his discharge on three months' notice—

Mr. Paget: The Minister says that the Amendment would provide for a fixed period only. That is not right. It is entirely a question of discretion. It allows for an indefinite period, as at present, or for a fixed period in special cases, if it is thought desirable. It merely widens the present discretion; it in no way confines it.

Mr. Taylor: As I read it, the Amendment would provide for the continuance for a fixed period only, subject to the airman's right to have his discharge be-

fore the end of the period, on giving three months' notice.

Mr. Paget: That is not what the Amendment says. It refers to
the period requested in the application
which may be an indefinite or a fixed period—
or for such less period as the competent air force authority may approve.
That may be on a three months' to three months' basis. The Amendment simply provides that the Air Force can lay down a fixed period if it chooses and the airman agrees.

Mr. Taylor: I appreciate that, but I cannot see what advantage the Amendment confers either upon the man or the Service. If there were any merit in the Amendment which would do either of those things some reasonable purpose would be served in discussing details, but as the Amendment is drafted I cannot see that it benefits either the man or the Service.

Mr. Paget: A man who comes to the end of his period of service may wish to continue. Surely there are circumstances in which he would like to continue for a definite period, just as there are when he enlists. It would then be for the convenience of the Air Force to fix a definite period. Why should there not be some discretion to deal with this point? An indefinite period may usually be convenient, and nothing in the Amendment would prevent it, but if a fixed period is desired the Amendment allows for it.

Mr. Taylor: The hon. and learned Gentleman is a very persuasive advocate, hut, as in the case of his previous Amendment, I am not prepared to give way to his arguments.

Amendment negatived.

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That the Clause stand part of the Bill.

5.0 p.m.

Mr. Paget: I read this Clause several times, trying to ascertain its meaning, and I hope that the Minister will not be offended if I say that I have a feeling that he himself had some difficulty in ascertaining just what it means.
I tried in a proposed new Clause—(Continuation in service in Royal Air Force after end of term)—which has not


been selected, to say in simple language what I thought this Clause meant. I think that it means that
A person in air force service who has served not less than twelve years may, in the last year of his current term, apply to be kept on, and if the competent air force authority consent he shall continue as though his term were unexpired save that sections nine to eleven of this Act shall no longer apply to him and that he may at any time claim his discharge on giving three months' notice in writing".
Is not that in fact what Clause 12 states, and, if so, would not this be a simpler way of expressing it?

Question put and agreed to.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 13 and 14 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 15.—(TRANSITIONAL PROVISIONS RELATING TO SECTIONS 8 TO 14.)

Mr. Cronin: I beg to move, in page 13, line 36, to leave out subsection (2).
Would it be convenient, Dr. King, to discuss with this Amendment the following Amendment, to leave out subsection (3)?

The Temporary Chairman (Dr. Horace King): I see no reason why we should not.

Mr. Cronin: We on this side of the Committee have no objection to subsection (2) or to subsection (3), but we feel that these transitional provisions are extremely important, and, as the language of the subsections is somewhat complex, I should be grateful if the Under-Secretary of State would give us an explanation which would perhaps make it clearer to us.

Mr. W. J. Taylor: These Amendments are in effect drafting Amendments. The Clause is intended to clarify the position of the existing airmen, that is the airman already serving when the new Act comes into force. In general, it provides for the terms of service of existing airmen to remain unaffected, although there may be some changes in terminology. Subsection (2) ensures the repeal of Sections 4 to 8 of the 1955 Act. It does not affect the terms of service of airmen already enlisted under that Act. If we left it out, as proposed in the first Amendment, the enlistments would be invalid.
Subsection (3) is concerned only with existing airmen who enlisted after attaining the minimum age for man service, that is 17½, and before they reached the age of 18. The deletion of this subsection, as proposed in the second Amendment, would mean that such airmen would be liable to serve a longer term than they expected on enlistment, because the relevant date from which the term of service would run would be at the age of 18 instead of the date of enlistment. Any change in the meaning of the term "relevant date" would also have an effect on the reckoning of the period of service necessary to qualify the airman to apply to extend his term of service beyond twelve years.
The third Amendment has reference to Clause 10 (4), which it seeks to delete.

The Temporary Chairman: Order. That Amendment has not been selected.

Mr. Taylor: For reasons which are largely technical, as I have explained, we feel that the Committee should not accept the Amendment.

Mr. Cronin: In view of the Under-Secretary of State's lucid explanation, which may have been a little more comprehensible to some of my hon. Friends than to myself, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 16 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 17.—(AMENDMENT OF SECTION 14 OF ARMY ACT, 1955, AND AIR FORCE ACT, 1955.)

Mr. Wigg: I beg to move in page 15, line 19, after "pounds", to insert:
or such other amount (whether more or less than twenty pounds) as may be prescribed".

Brigadier Sir Otho Prior-Palmer: Would the hon. Gentleman like to suggest that we should take this Amendment and the following two Amendments together?
In page 15, line 21, leave out paragraph (a) and insert:
(a) the right conferred by this section shall not be exercisable by a recruit before the expiration of two months beginning with the date of his attestation.


In page 15, line 32, at end insert:
but the period of the proclamation shall not count as part of the three months commencing at the date of attestation, and the recruit shall be entitled to 'exercise' the right conferred by this section during the first three months of his service during which the proclamation under section ten of this Act shall not be in force

Mr. Wigg: I have no objection to the Amendment in page 15, line 21, being discussed with this one, but the Amendment, in page 15, line 32, is on a different subject and has to be discussed in relation to Section 10 of the 1955 Act.

Mr. Christopher Mayhew: I think that it might make for greater clarity if we took the three Amendments separately. The reason for that, I think, will emerge when we discuss them.

Mr. Wigg: Perhaps the Committee will bear with me if I say a word about the Clause. It is a very interesting fact that the House, at various stages, has had to be convinced on what seemed to me a fairly obvious fact. At the beginning of this controversy about the Army and the number of recruits which would be obtained in ultimate years, the main discussion was in terms of manpower. It always seemed to me to be crystal clear that the size of the Army was determined not by the number of men who joined but by how long they joined. It took us until 1956 or 1957 to get that proposition accepted, and now that it is accepted it is completely relevant. It does not matter whether a man joins for 3, 6, 9 or 22 years in relation to the immediate manpower targets of the Government. The length of the engagement on which he is now serving does not affect it, because it will take him on to 1962–63.
What matters is not only the number of men who join but the number of men who go out. Hon. Members will remember when they were young having to work out the problem of how much water there was in a bath. It is not only the amount of water which comes into the bath which must be considered, but the amount of water that goes down the waste hole. Although one is reluctant to talk about it, it has been clear for two or three years that wastage in the Army has been very high.
Last year I started to do a little homework on this subject. I discovered some interesting facts. Under Section 14 of the Army Act, which gives a soldier the statutory right to take his discharge within three months, the rate was fixed at £10 in the latter part of the nineteenth century—in about 1880—and then at £20 in 1920. It became clear that if those figures were right in those years, because of the changes in the value of money—and there have been many changes—and the changes in the rates of pay, they were wrong today.
During the Second Reading debate I put forward the view, as I did in the Select Committee in 1955, that this form of wastage ought to be looked at. To my surprise I found that, as so often, I was exposing myself to misrepresentation on the charge of being illiberal, on the ground that at all costs nothing must be done to infringe the right of the soldier, that he must have the right to go and that £20 was the right figure.
This staggered me a little because for 91 clays, or the first three months, the man is all right, but on the 92nd day down comes the chopper. A man then finds himself having to pay not £20 but £250 to go out. On top of that, in the Army, in particular, there is an Army Council Instruction—I will not weary the House with details of it—which lays down a whole list of trades from which a man cannot purchase his discharge at all without special reference to the War Office.
This is a grave problem, and it will get worse. In January, the Secretary of State for War was kind enough to give me some figures for 1958–59. He told me that the number of men claiming the right to purchase discharge under Section 14 was 1,650 and that thereafter, that is to say, outside Section 14, under the provisions of the Royal Warrant, 567, making a total of 2,217. For 1959–60 the figures were, under Section 14, 2,206, and thereafter 676, making a total of 2,882.
At that stage he could not give me the figures beyond November, but the other day I asked him to give me the completed figures for 1960–61. They show that Section 14 discharges amounted to 2,056, and that thereafter under the purchase provisions they leapt to 1,063, making a total wastage of 3,149 under the purchase provisions alone.
Those figures are high, but I must confess—and here I hope that I will not bore my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget)—that when one tries to break the figures down into arms of the Service, or when one breaks them down inside arms of the Service, that is to say, if one takes discharge by purchase in the Foot Guards and in other infantry regiments, one finds that the range is very wide. In the infantry as a whole the figure is slightly less than 3 per cent. The figure for the Foot Guards is about 4 per cent. No less than five areas are above the average, going as high as 5·2 per cent. in the Parachute Regiment.
There are clearly some odd forces at work, and I was glad to learn from the Secretary of State for War that the War Office is investigating this problem. I do not think that it is capable of easy solution. There are a number of forces at work, one of which is that some regiments have higher standards than others. Life being perhaps a little harder in one case than in another, it tends to make a person want to leave one regiment but not another. However, there is an easy answer to this.
5.15 p.m.
The Amendment proposes to give the Secretary of State for War flexibility while retaining—and it is right that it should be retained—the statutory right to permit discharge by purchase within three months. The recruit has a statutory right to go, but the rate at which he shall go and the period when he shall go shall be determined by the Army Council and it shall be governed both as to the amount and the period by regulation. At the moment it is £20, and it has to be effective within three months. If the Secretary of State for War wants to make a change he has to get the legislation amended either as regards the amount or as regards the period.
What I am asking the Committee to accept is by no means an innovation. This is a serious matter to those who are concerned with the future strength of the Army. I do not want to bowl a googly or a quick one to which the Minister has no answer. I say this without trying to score points. If anyone says that the Army Council or the Secretary of State for War will be given

too much power by introducing flexibility, let me point out that flexibility exists in the Women's Service. A woman recruit has a statutory right to take her discharge within three months, but the conditions under which she does so, both as regards amount and time, are governed not by the Army Act but by Article 602 (B) of the Royal Warrant, which says:
A recruit who claims her discharge under Section 14 shall pay such sum as is prescribed in the following Table …
One sees in the table that a recruit pays £3 if she takes her discharge within one month, and £15 if she takes her discharge at any time between one month and three months.
I do not know how that comes about, in view of the terms of Section 14, but I point out to the Committee that this flexibility both as to time and period exists under the provisions of the Royal Warrant. My proposal is therefore not a startling, revolutionary one, but is in accordance with established practice.
It is important that the statutory right of the soldier should be retained. It is also important that the Army Council should keep the situation under review and under control, and if in its wisdom it wants to keep the amount at £20 and do what the Amendment says, namely, limit the right of a man to take his discharge after two months after he has had a taste of it and knows what it is like, it can do so. On the other hand, if many recruits are coming in and the Army Council wants to do for the men what it can do for the women under Article 602, there is nothing to stop it doing so.
For those reasons, I ask the Committee to accept the Amendment as being common sense and in accordance with existing facts. It will retain the liberal spirit which has been expressed and will meet the conditions which the Army Council has to face at the present time.

Dr. Alan Glyn: I support the Amendment. The Committee will appreciate that this is a very important matter. We have all discussed getting recruits, but, as the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has said, this is one of the methods by which we lose many men.
The hon. Member put it very aptly when he said that in 1920 the cost of purchasing a discharge was £20, so that the sum was now quite unrealistic. As he said, a recruit of less than three months' service can purchase his discharge at the cost of £20, but, within 24 hours of having completed his three months' service, may have to pay £250. There is no rhyme or reason in that sudden rise.
The Secretary of State should have some sort of power to alter the amounts. It may be that he should be able not only to alter the amount year by year, but to alter the amount taking into consideration the amount of money which has been spent on training the man. The State may have been put to a great deal of expense if a man has been trained for three months. At the same time, the Army should consider, as it does, whether there are any compassionate grounds on which a man should be discharged.
I hope that the Minister will accept the Amendment, which would be beneficial to the Army and give the Secretary of State a great deal more flexibility in this matter of the purchase of discharge.

Mr. Mayhew: The Amendment has been proposed and supported in two persuasive speeches, yet I hope that the Government will be slow to accept it. We all agree that purchasing discharge is a critical problem, but all the arguments advanced by the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) and the hon. Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn) were carefully considered by the Select Committee, although we concluded that it would not help recruiting or keep men in the Army if the sum were increased from £20.
It is true that this flexibility exists in the case of purchase of discharge by women, but the problem is not the problem of women purchasing their discharge but of men doing so. The Select Committee concluded that, in view of the resulting publicity, it would not help recruiting to raise the sum from £20, thus giving the public an impression of failure. We also bore in mind that, although it might not appear to be a very large sum, it bore with unequal strength on persons of different wealth and income. What might be a negligible sum to some men might be considerable to others.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley suggested that if £20 was right all those years ago, it must be wrong today. Although the value of the £ has gone down and down, the idea that money should be a test in this kind of thing has also diminished, in the sense that we are now less willing to declare that a man should remain in the Army if he cannot afford a certain sum than we were at the time when the £20 figure was fixed.
It may be a good thing for Parliament to decide the issue of flexibility. We want to impose on the Army Council the greatest possible incentive to go ahead with the acclimatisation of the young recruit, to attract him into the Army and to persuade him to remain in, rather than to give him what might be wrongly considered to be an easy way out, or pressuring him to remain by increasing the amount of money which he has to pay for his discharge.

Mr. Wigg: I fully appreciate my hon. Friend's argument that the House of Commons and the country as a whole reject the idea of the test of money. But how does it come about that, at a time when my hon. Friend was a Minister, he accepted the principle of the purchase of discharge jumping to £250 on the ninety-second day?

Mr. Mayhew: The recruit has the right to purchase his discharge in the first three months, but no right at all to do so after the three months. The two are not strictly comparable.
Those are substantial reasons for keeping Parliament in control of this matter and I do not see why the recommendations of the Select Committee should not be included in the Bill. That seems a sufficient answer to the Amendment.

Dr. Alan Glyn: Would not the hon. Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew) agree that the sum might also be reduced as well as raised?

Mr. Mayhew: That is theoretical. I have never heard it seriously suggested.

Mr. Shinwell: I am not very much impressed by the view that because the Select Committee came to a certain decision it should be accepted by this Committee. I say that merely in passing.
This is a matter of considerable complexity, ranging far beyond mere monetary considerations and how much should be paid by a recruit who, having served rather less than three months in the Army, wishes to terminate his engagement. I appreciate the purpose behind the Amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) is concerned here primarily not with how much the recruit will pay to terminate his engagement, but with the whole matter of wastage, of which this is a very important aspect. We cannot debate the whole subject of wastage now, although, of course, reference can be made to it.
On more than one occasion, in the course of many speeches on the subject, my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley, whose speeches we have all enjoyed and which have illumined our minds with the information which they furnish from time to time, has frequently said that no matter what we do by means of television advertising or other devices to stimulate recruitment, there is a constant factor in the number of recruits who can be induced to join the Services. If that is so, the question of fixing the figure for the purchase of discharge with- in three months at £20, or providing some flexibility, does not, in logic, have much bearing on how we are to curtail wastage.
When I had to deal with the problem, the circumstances were somewhat different, because we had at our disposal a vast reservoir of National Service men and there was no question of terminating the National Service Acts. We are now on the eve of the termination of that legislation and the problem facing the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for War is far more formidable than that which I had to face. It was then easy to tackle the problem. I qualify that by saying that it was not so easy as might be thought, because, even with all the vast number of men at our disposal, during the Korean crisis we had to extend the term of engagement and call up reserves.
5.30 p.m.
I often wondered why, with these millions of National Service men, we were placed in such a quandary. I never could understand it. One has to depend on expert advisers, particularly if one is

an amateur like myself—I am not accusing the right hon. Gentleman of being as amateurish as I was—but the advisers were unable to find the solution to the problem. I regard this matter as almost insoluble unless, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley has proposed more than once, we revert to the National Service Act either by means of a selective ballot or by means of a direct piece of legislation by which men are called up for a stipulated period.

Mr. Wigg: My right hon. Friend says that I have always claimed that the number of men available to be recruited is constant. What he fails to see is that that number is the number of men joining. We are here discussing what happens after they have joined.
Secondly, my right hon. Friend slightly misrepresented me, which I am sure is accidental. I have said that as long as the commitments are kept as they are, we shall not be able to recruit sufficient men to discharge them. There are three courses of action: to cut the commitments; to introduce conscription in some form; or, as will probably happen, looking at both Front Benches, to do nothing.

Mr. Shinwell: That is a subject relevant to an Army Estimates debate, when we deal with the whole range of problems associated with recruitment, the commitments and the future of the Services. I do not propose to detain the Committee with considerations of that sort, but I will deal with the first part of that interjection—that we are dealing not so much with the matter of recruitment as with that of retaining men in the Service once we have recruited them. That question which arises on the Amendment is whether we accept the right hon. Gentleman's proposal, which, according to my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew), was the submission of the Select Committee, or whether we impart a measure of flexibility in the hope of easing the situation both for the recruit and for the War Office.
It is a dilemma. If we provide flexibility and leave the decision to the Army Council, as a result of some maladministration there might be a diminution in recruitment. Men will say, when about to enlist in the Service, "After all, if I do not like the job I can intimate


before three months have expired that I want to leave, and I can manage to rasie £20, or my friends will raise it for me. Because it will be so easy to leave the Service, I will join." It is true that wastage is at a fairly high level, but it is only a percentage of the number of recruits to the Service. Many recruits may be induced to remain in the Service if new devices are employed by those who are responsible for administration and for the welfare of the men.
When I had to go round the depots, accompanied by a vast entourage of be-ribboned and be-medalled high-ranking military gentlemen, I often thought that the demeanour of some of the non-commissioned officers was rather harsh, and their expression to the men was not calculated to endear them to the men. It may be different now-I hope that it is—but it worried me a good deal and I did not like it. Once or twice I asked the adjutant, or whoever was accompanying me, whether they could not stop that sort of thing. Why is it necessary to shout at the men? I can understand a little shouting when they are doing square-bashing or are on parade and they do not appear to be as satisfactory in their dress or in their drill as the N.C.O. would like, but when someone is being shown round and is looking at the men, why do they shout at them and bully them—or appear to be bullying them? There may be nothing in it; it may be just their method. But in my opinion much more welfare is required.
If a young fellow enlists at the age of 18 and finds after three months or ten or eleven weeks that he is unsuitable and does not like the company, or the way in which he is being bullied or appears to be bullied, then it could be helpful if someone were to talk to him about it. But not the chaplain. I do not think that they want to be sermonised and preached at. They could be talked to in a reasonable way and perhaps persuaded to remain in the Service. That would be far more effective than all the flexibility which my hon. Friend has mentioned.
I do not know what could be done in that direction. I very much doubt whether flexibility will lead to more enlistment. Moreover, I am not at all happy about leaving the decision in the hands of the Army Council. It would

not always rest with the Council but would be left in the hands of the commanding officers. I doubt whether many cases would come before the Army Council. I would not leave it to anybody to decide as a matter of judgment. Good judgment is not a peculiarity of people in the Service on matters of this sort. I do not want to be offensive in any way, but there is a possibility that their judgment would err on certain occasions. I am sorry that I cannot support my hon. Friend.

Mr. Wigg: I am sorry, too, but I should have been even more sorry if it were for the reasons given by my right hon. Friend, because quite clearly, although he has been Secretary of State for War, he does not appear to understand how the Regulations are prescribed. They are certainly not at the level of commanding officer but at that of Secretary of State. Perhaps it was not so in his day.

Mr. Shinwell: Is it necessary to direct attention to my limitations? I am more conscious of them than is my hon. Friend and always have been—and never more conscious of them than when he was my Parliamentary Private Secretary and frequently informed me of them. But I managed to get through, and I believe that in certain quarters it has been said that I managed with a qualified measure of success. I will not put it higher than that.
I am sorry to disappoint my hon. Friend, but I feel that on balance it is far better to have a rigid and arbitrary figure of £20 within a period of three months. After that it is at the discretion of the Army Council, and I know that it can go up to £200 or more. I have received correspondence from men who have had difficulty when they wanted to get out of the Army and could not raise the money.
If flexibility is provided and a recruit who wants to leave before the end of three months shows some potential, his commanding officer may wish to retain him in the Service and may say to him, "You cannot leave unless you pay £100."

Mr. Wigg: The present sum is £20 within three months, as provided by Section 14 of the 1955 Act. I want the Secretary of State to do exactly as happens in the case of women already,


namely, to do it by Royal Warrant. This is nothing to do with the commanding officer. It is done by the Secretary of State in exercise of his powers.

Mr. Shinwell: Exactly. The words are:
twenty pounds or such other amount … as may be prescribed 
by the Secretary of State.

Mr. Wigg: It does not say that.

Mr. Shinwell: That is the Amendment. What is the Amendment, if it is not that? Despite my limitations, I can read, and perhaps it would be better if I now read the Amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley and others of my hon. Friends, most of whom are absent from our discussions. The Amendment in page 15, line 19. is to this effect:
after 'pounds', insert 'or such other amount (whether more or less than twenty pounds) as may be prescribed'.
The word "more" is important. Twenty pounds would be the arbitrary sum within three months. After three months it could be any figure. It is to be prescribed, presumably by the Secretary of State. It could be £30, £50 or £100. It could go up to a very high figure.
It would be detrimental to the Service if men who wished to leave were restrained. If men where straining at the leash to get out and were dissatisfied with the conditions, it would be detrimental to the Service if they were prevented from doing so merely because in measure of flexibility were imparted n the matter of discharge by purchase. On this occasion I am bound to support my hon. Friend on the Front Bench, and I hope that that will be counted unto me for righteousness.

Mr. E. G. Willis: I am in agreement with my right hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell). We should be very careful before we accept the Amendment. These provisions give the soldier a certain guarantee, a certain privilege, in respect of his ability to change his mind within three months. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) said that this was an expression of the spirit of liberality. I think so, too. It is precisely because that is so that we should be careful before we whittle it away.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley pointed to the very large wastage figures which have taken place in the past two or three years due to discharge by purchase within the first three months of service. My hon. Friend suggests that we should give the Army Council the power to change the figure of £20. I submit that in the conditions of the day the change would be upwards. I shall later suggest that it will never be downwards. Therefore, if the Amendment were carried, Parliament would be saying to the Army Council, "You can fix the figure. You can determine how liberal we, the House of Commons, are going to be. You can decide whether we shall let people get out easily during the first three months by virtue of the sum that you, the Army Council, decide shall be paid to secure discharge".
5.45 p.m.
I am not prepared to leave this to the Army Council. In present circumstances the sum would always be increased. It would never be reduced. I should like to be told what the circumstances are in which the sum is likely to be reduced, if any hon. Member thinks that that would happen.

Dr. Alan Glyn: A man might have grounds which were short of compassionate grounds and the Secretary of State, or whatever the authority is, might well decide that it was reasonable to release him on payment of a lower figure. The Amendment would give complete flexibility and allow the appropriate authority to deal with individual cases.

Mr. Willis: As I read the Amendment, it would not achieve that purpose. If the Amendment were carried, the provision would be as follows:
on payment of a sum not exceeding twenty pounds or such other amount (whether more or less than twenty pounds) as may be prescribed".
When is it likely to become less than £20?
I assume that there is only one set of conditions in which that is likely to happen, namely, if the Army finds itself with too many men. In those circumstances, the obvious course would be to be more selective in recruiting. As far as I know, every Service aims at being selective in its recruiting. I am confident that, if the Army could get as


many recruits as it wanted—more than it wanted; the more the merrier from the Army point of view—it would be much more selective in its recruiting.
There are other ways of solving the problem of having too many men. Because that is so and because the Army could be more selective, the figure of £20 would never be reduced but would always be raised. This would be done on our authority by the Army Council. It may be true that the Secretary of State would prescribe it, but the House of Commons would not discuss it because there is no provision that the figure must be changed by regulation to be approved by the House of Commons. If the Amendment were passed, we should give the Army Council the right to fix the figure as high as it liked. We should allow the Army Council to destroy what my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley called our great spirit of liberality to as great an extent as it wished to destroy it. The Committee should think twice before doing this, and I sincerely hope that the Amendment will not be accepted.

The Secretary of State for War (Mr. John Profumo): It may be for the convenience of the Committee if at this stage, having listened very carefully to all the arguments, I state what my views on the Amendment are. It must be unusual for a Minister to come to Parliament and refuse to be given more flexibility and greater powers, but on this occasion it is my duty to take the opposite attitude to the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg), whose sincerity I fully appreciate and understand.
Section 14 of the Army Act, 1955, and the Air Force Act, 1955, gives a recruit the right to buy himself out during the first three months on payment of £20. Some flexibility already exists under the 1955 Acts. The hon. Member for Dudley wants to give me the power to vary the amount upwards if necessary. I already have power to make it less. The words are "not exceeding". The whole argument about changing the present sum is so that the Secretary of State and the Army Council could, if they wished, put the price up.
It is clearly Parliament's intention that there should be a period during which a soldier can have second thoughts. The Clause seeks to modify this to the extent that the Army and Air Councils would

be given power to make regulations stopping the exercise of this right during the first two months of a recruit's service. The period of two months is a maximum period, and a ban would be imposed on any period within that maximum.
As has been pointed out, Clause 17 was inserted by the Select Committee, whose reasons are set out in paragraphs 10–15 of the Special Report. The Committee may recollect that during the debate on the Army Estimates in March, I said that I should be perfectly prepared to accept this, but the present Amendment is quite clearly intended to give the Army and Air Councils complete freedom to vary the amount of the purchase money from nothing at all upwards, without any limit at all.
I should like to remind the Committee that during the Second Reading debate I said of the purchase price:
… I believe that it would be against the interests of recruiting, which the House has so much at heart, if it were felt that we were trying to hold a man to the forces against his will by making the price of purchasing out prohibitive. Anyway, if a man has made a genuine mistake in coming into the forces, I am not sure that it is not far better to let him go."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 2nd February, 1961; Vol. 633, c. 1209.]
We do not want reluctant soldiers.
I am happy to say that the Select Committee endorsed this view. It came to the conclusion that an increase in the purchase price from £20 to, say, £50, would be unfair to the recruit whose means, or family means, were inadequate, despite the fact, and I agree with the hon. Member for Dudley, that £50 could probably be raised today much more easily than could the £10 required in 1881, or the £20 in 1920.
The Select Committee endorsed the view that the publicity given to any change in the sum might have—and I think that it probably would have—an adverse effect on recruitment. I am sure that this must be the case, and I do not think that we should substitute for the old system of what might be called press-ganging some new system which one might call tele-ganging because, once having brought them in, we have to make them stick there.
The hon. Member for Dudley has made it clear that he wants this to be only a permissive power, but I think that


it might make just that difference to many would-be recruits who were genuinely uncertain about the step they were about to take if we introduced the possibility of an upward variation in purchase money at any moment that I or the Army Council might decide.
Of course, if we were starting anew, and fixing the price from scratch, and if the need to attract recruits were not of such over-riding importance, these psychological considerations might not arise. I might then well have found myself in the company of the hon. Member for Dudley in thinking that some figure higher than £20 was right to start at, but I am sure that the key to the problem is to give the recruit a proper chance to settle down. That is the object of our taking power to impose the ban. It will provide a means of ensuring that a recruit does give the Army or the Air Force a fair trial before exercising his statutory right—which, I take it, Parliament still wishes him to have—to buy himself out.
In the Army, we are still losing a lot of recruits, and most of those who buy their discharge do so in the first month. I am told that many of those who do so would become good and contented soldiers if they persevered just long enough to get over the first unsettled weeks, and I believe that a maximum ban of two months from joining is adequate for the purpose. That now leaves only one month during which the recruit can buy himself out for a reasonable sum.
I was particularly interested in what the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) had to say on the subject. If I may say so, his tenure of office in the War Office is still regarded with the greatest possible admiration and respect by all the soldiers I have come across. I should tell the Committee that I am making special arrangements to look after new recruits, and I can refer to that, if the Committee wishes me to do so, when we debate the Question "That the Clause stand part of the Bill."
Perhaps the strongest reason for rejecting the Amendment is that its object is to enable the Army and Air Councils to raise the cost of the purchase of discharge to a level which will hold more

recruits in the Army against their will. This would be clearly contrary to the intention of Parliament, enshrined in the Act, that recruits shall have an escape route if they find that they have made a genuine mistake.
We must also bear in mind what goes on today in life outside the Armed Forces. Many firms have apprenticeship schemes, and spend sometimes hundreds of pounds on young men as apprentices. But those young men can walk out; the firms have no hold on them at all. I do not think that it would be right to say that just because we in the Army and the Royal Air Force have to spend some money on these young men, they must stay. If they find that they are not fitted or not suited to the life, or that they have made a genuine mistake, we must let them take this step. Apart from this, I consider that the Amendment is undesirable, because I believe that it would have a bad effect on recruiting, and because we do not want reluctant warriors in the Army or the Air Force. For those reasons, I must ask the Committee to reject the Amendment.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: If I had any doubts as to how I should vote on this Amendment I have certainly been convinced by the absolutely logical arguments of the Secretary of State. I would say, without embarrassing him, that it is the most sensible speech I have heard the right hon. Gentleman make since he became Secretary of State for War. If he has to lead his troops into the Lobby against the Amendment, I shall follow him, not as a reluctant recruit but as an enthusiastic supporter.
I am also glad on this occasion to be able to support my own Front Bench, and I do so because I think that there is something very insidious in this Amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) collects his facts with amazing industry and I am always impressed by them and glad to have them, but I am always very doubtful when he starts drawing conclusions from those facts. He and I then sometimes part company, and I have to part from him on this occasion.
There are some words that very often take the trick in arguments in this Committee, and one of them is this blessed


word "flexibility". What can that word mean? If it were flexibility from £20 down to 10s. I should agree with it, but when the flexibility means a sum from £20 upwards it is obvious, for the very convincing arguments advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Willis), that we cannot agree. This Amendment means "All power to the Army Council," and I would not for a moment subscribe to that slogan.
What is the background to all this? Naturally, we have wastage figures, because when a recruit gets into the Army he sometimes finds it very different from the way it was advertised on the television screen or the recruiting posters. When, in my part of the country, it looked as though there were no prospects of greater employment in the mining industry, some of the miners joined the Army. They then found that there was a good deal of the shouting and the bawling and bullying to which my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell)—

Mr. Shinwell: Not gallant.

6.0 p.m.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: My right hon. Friend is gallant. I use the word, not in the accepted Parliamentary sense because, even though he was not in the Army, he is certainly a very gallant Parliamentary fighter.
My right hon. Friend certainly struck the nail on the head. I do not see this wastage problem getting any better. When a recruit enters the Army, for the first three months—or at least for the first 24 hours—he might be treated with a certain amount of civility but then, after that initial period, the Army goes back to bawling and shouting. In any case, I do not see how one can run an Army without all the shouting and the bawling that goes on. It cannot be run like a Sunday school. It is obvious that a number of recruits, after their first three months, will want to leave and. if so, I agree with the principle that was outlined by the Secretary of State.
We should consider how the present system compares with other organisations and industries. Would anyone suggest that a recruit to the coal mining industry, if he does not like the job after the first three months, should have to pay the Coal Board £20? I fail to see

why the Army should not be able to compete with coal mining. After all, coal mining is not on industry. It is an atrocity.

Mr. Mayhew: My hon. Friend may be interested in evidence that was given to the Select Committee, which showed that the rate of wastage in the first three months in coal mining was greater than in the first three months in the Army.

Mr. Hughes: That is what I am arguing about. But I do not think that the Select Committee advanced the proposal to encourage men to go into the coal mines—to work a 4 ft. seam—and then, if they do not like it after three months, to pay £20 to leave. If those sort of principles were laid down, how many recruits would the coal mining industry get?
The Army must compete with industry. I have been arguing for many years that this is rather an insoluable problem; that in times of full employment the Army is not likely to get the recruits it requires—and that is a problem that the Secretary of State will have to tackle. I am glad to agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is better not to have reluctant soldiers. But perhaps the greatest form of compulsion is monetary compulsion. If one relies on monetary penalties, then that reliance acts as a compulsion. I can assure my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley that if he attempts to try to take this matter into the Division Lobby, I shall support the Government.

Sir Arthur Vere Harvey: I am very pleased that the Secretary of State has taken the line he has. He has certainly shown himself to be original, but that is not saying that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has not acted with sincerity, for we know that he always does that.
Recruitment into the Army today is an important matter. Times have changed and the Army and Air Force have got to keep in line with other institutions. The Secretary of State referred to this, to other industries and to apprenticeships. But the wastage happens in many other institutions, for instance, in universities, where there it is tremendous. Time and money are spent on training young people and then they decide to change their minds. I suppose that it is their prerogative to


have a passion for something, and then change their minds about it, and there seems no reason why, as in other fields, they should not do the same in the Army.
Many young people today go out and, in the light of the experience so gained, change their ideas and do something else. I consider that the three months' period should be raised to six months to keep recruits in the two Services. Although it might be argued that to keep them longer would be more costly, that object might be achieved if they had a longer period in which to get used to the atmosphere. Perhaps a spell overseas might help them to make up their minds within the initial nine or ten weeks.
I am sure that the general feeling of the Committee is right, that the amount of £20 should not be increased beyond that figure and that recruits should be looked upon in an entirely new light. The matter cannot be approached as it was forty years ago. Even if the men can raise this money, it is not always convenient to raise £20, let alone £50, and we must consider this from the point of view of people living near the breadline, even though wages today are reasonably good. Therefore, while it might be easy for some men to raise the money, it might be difficult for a few and I hope that the line adopted by the Secretary of State will be accepted by all hon. Members.

Mr. Wigg: I will not press this Amendment to a Division. While I assure my hon. Friend that there is an insidious purpose behind it, in that I want to see an official, all-Regular Army, if I am in a minority in that quest, then I do not want to waste the time of the Committee.
I must, first, deal with the "liberality" of the Secretary of State. A few weeks ago a young soldier joined the Regular Army and, shortly afterwards, his father died in tragic circumstances. I wanted to get the boy out. "Yes," I was told, "He can purchase his discharge for £200." Meanwhile, the Secretary of State today tells us that in civilian life apprentices do not walk out.

Mr. M. Foot: That is a case for bringing down the £200 figure, and not for pushing up the £20 one.

Mr. Wigg: That is all right on the front page of the Tribune, but it will not do here.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: Or on the back page.

Mr. Wigg: Or on an inside page, I suppose. But the Secretary of State is turning this Amendment down on the ground of liberality concerning this concession.

Mr. Foot: Extend the liberality.

Mr. Wigg: If my hon. Friend has something to say, will he get to his feet?

Mr. Foot: My hon. Friend complained about my previous interruption and said that it was not relevant. But it was my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) who talked about liberality. His cure for the illiberality of the Secretary of State is to introduce more illiberality and a figure higher than £20.

Mr. Wigg: On the contrary. It is to keep it to as narrow a period as possible.

Mr. S. Silverman: Mr. S. Silverman rose—

Mr. Wigg: Do not interrupt.
What is the main point of the figures? I predict that the wastage will go on and that it will get worse. It seems common sense that if one turns round and says, "You cannot do it during the first eight weeks of the grievances", one narrows the period during which they can take action.
I am prepared and content to rest on my judgment, as I was with regard to the three-year engagement. I am used to being in a minority of one in this House, but I urge the Secretary of State that before making a comparison of what happens in civilian and Army life he should read Army Council Instruction No. 58, of 1958. He will see that there are 90 trades in the Army, but that there is complete restriction. These are the simple facts.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment, but in a year or so I will put down a couple of Questions to the Secretary of State to see just who was right.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

The Deputy-Chairman (Major Sir William Anstruther-Gray): I think that there has been sufficient discussion on the principle of the next Amendment, in page 15, line 21.

Mr. Mayhew: I beg to move, in page 15, line 21, to leave out paragraph (a) and to insert:
(a) the right conferred by this section shall not be exerciseable by a recruit before the expiration of two months beginning with the date of his attestation.
I should like to put one or two questions to the Secretary of State, Sit William. In resisting the last Amendment the Minister took credit for himself for resisting a suggestion that he should be given greater powers, compared with Parliament. He and the Army Council, he said, should not be left to decide this matter; Parliament should.
The effect of this Amendment is that Parliament, and not the Secretary of State and the Army Council, should decide on the two months' ban. It seems to me that the same arguments apply in both cases. It seems more suitable that the question of two months should be decided by this House, rather than by the Army Council and the Secretary of State—for exactly the same reasons the Secretary of State advanced on the last Amendment.
Parliament should be the judge of this. Hon. Members should be the ones to decide whether or not the two months' suggestion is a good idea. As the Bill stands, the two months is only permissive. We give the Army Council only the right to insist on the recruit staying for two months. We should decide whether that should be so in the Bill, because that would seem to be a much more satisfactory way of dealing with it. Everything that has been said about the importance of wastage in our discussion on the previous Amendment seems to me to support what I am now saying. Parliament must take an active and keen interest in the whole question of wastage. It is not something that we can push on to the Army Council to solve in their own way.
The Secretary of State, I believe, used the expression "tele-ganging". I regret that he used such an awful phrase, but I think I know what he has in mind. Since March he has been advertising on

television for recruits, and he has decided that he cannot allow a situation to exist whereby a man is persuaded by a television commercial feature to join the Army and then he clamps down on the man once he is in the Army. That is "tele-ganging" instead of press-ganging.
I should like to ask the Minister, though, what are the facts behind this phrase. What is the rate of discharge of those who have been recruited as a result of his television drive? May I draw his attention to the figures for recruiting in March and April which he stated to me, in a Written Answer, are 24 per cent. up on March and April last year? One might, therefore, have expected that the rate of increase in the Regular Army during the same two months this year would have been 24 per cent. up on the rate of increase in the Regular Army for those two months last year. There are, of course, other factors to be taken into account, but it would be reasonable to expect that.
I have taken the trouble to look at the figures, and I find that the rate of increase during these two months in the Regular Army for March and April, 1960 was 981—that is, for the long-term engagement other ranks, the key figure. We ought to expect that the rate of increase for these two months this year would be 24 per cent. higher. Instead of being 240 more, as it should be, it is only 37 more. The rate of increase was 1,018. What do these figures mean? It seems to me that there has been a much greater rate of wastage during these two months than in the previous year.
Will the Secretary of State let us know the facts? It bears out what I feel should be our view, that Parliament must take a keen and intimate interest in this question of wastage. After all, it is not only useless recruiting people if the rate of wastage keeps pace; it is positively harmful and costly. The expense of training a man for the two or three months that he is a recruit is considerable. In the Select Committee we were given a figure of £150 for six weeks' training only. When we multiply that by many hundreds it comes to a very considerable amount of money. Parliament should keep in close touch with this whole problem, and for that reason my Amendment, which takes this issue out of the discretion of


the Army Council and places it in the hands of Parliament, should commend itself to the Minister.

6.15 p.m.

Mr. Shinwell: The only difference between the Amendment and the Section that is under review is that my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew) wants to deny the Army Council the prerogative of prescribing regulations. The period of two months remains. I cannot see any reason in logic why we should prevent the Army Council from having the prerogative. After all, they are the people who have to deal with this matter of wastage. They are the best judges of whether the wastage can be corrected in some form or other. If it is to be corrected they are not only to be the judges of how it is to be done, but they are to be responsible for the administration that arises from their judgment.
Therefore, it seems to me that there is no particular virtue in this Amendment. It may have been put down for some other reason, perhaps to raise the whole question of wastage and its corollary, the matter of recruitment, but I do not see that there is any other virtue in it. The Secretary of State might say something about whether it is possible for him to devise some means of stepping up recruitment. I do not believe it is possible for him to do very much about wastage, beyond what has already been said about it, namely, the possibility of providing some welfare administration on an expanding and extended scale in order to keep the men from leaving the Service, Beyond that, I do not think much can be done.
When replying to my hon. Friend's question about the figures of recruitment, could the right hon. Gentleman say whether he sees any likelihood of being able to increase the number of recruits before the termination of the National Service Acts? If he is not so able, has he any alternative suggestions to make?
When my hon. Friends constantly referred to this matter of diminished recruiting and, at the same time, to the other side of the picture, namely, the increased wastage, the question might properly be posed to them, "If we are not able to secure the appropriate num-

ber of men, say the number of men required to meet our commitments, what are you proposing?"

Mr. Mayhew: Cut the commitments.

Mr. Shinwell: Now we have it. My hon. Friend says, "Cut the commitments." I must say that I detect a difficulty about this. I should like to cut all our commitments, but it seems to me that in the present state of the world, commitments are increasing all the time. For example, we have been informed about the possibility of trouble in Kuwait.

The Deputy-Chairman: Order. I am most reluctant to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but he will appreciate that this is a small Amendment.

Mr. Shinwell: It was quite proper for you to attempt to rebuke me, Sir William, as you were about to do, and I deserve it. I was merely using the reference as an illustration of the fact that we hear about tension here and there and it is increasing all the while. It is no use talking about cutting commitments. I have thought about this many a time in relation to Malaya, the Middle East and Germany. Field Marshal Montgomery suggested the other day in an article that he wrote for one of the Sunday newspapers that we ought to withdraw our troops from Germany.
There are several hon. Members who would probably support Field Marshal Montgomery, but I do not believe at the moment that that is practical politics, and I do not think it is related to the foreign policy of the Labour Party. It is certainly not related to the policy of Western European Union. I see my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Park (Mr. Mulley), who was a very important member of the Assembly. Indeed, on one occasion he was a rapporteur.

Mr. Mayhew: To avoid possible misunderstanding, perhaps my right hon. Friend should be reminded that we have constantly said that our commitments in Europe should not only be maintained, but strengthened.

Mr. Shinwell: That reinforces what I have been saying. It is no use talking about cutting commitments. A few moments ago my hon. Friend said that we should cut our commitments. Now


he says we have got to strengthen our forces.

The Deputy-Chairman: Order. We are getting worse, and not better. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will keep to the Amendment.

Mr. Shinwell: I hope that the Secretary of State will not accept this Amendment, because there is no virtue in it. The Army Council may make mistakes—there are errors of judgment in all quarters—and no doubt occasional blunders, but the Council is a responsible body of men with vast experience, headed by the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary. I am quite sure that they are able to exercise right judgment and decide the matter in the best interests of the Service and of the recruits.

Sir A. V. Harvey: Will the right hon. Gentleman ask his hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew) to tell the Committee which commitments the Opposition would cut?

The Deputy-Chairman: I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will not be led into replying to that question.

Mr. Wigg: I am interested in the way this discussion has turned to recruitment, and in what my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew) said about the increase in recruiting during March and April. I think that he has overlooked the influence which the boys have on figures, because, of course, they are not included in the target figures which he has in mind, and their effect is seasonal.
We find in the Air Force, for instance, a tremendous spurt at the end of each term. I have the corrected figures for April. I always correct them for that error which is introduced by the figures for boys. It seems to me that the figures for April, when making the comparison between 1960 and 1961, have to be corrected by something approaching 500. I think that a total of 500 boys included in April, 1961, was not included in April, 1960, and an adjustment must be made on that account.
I turn now to the problem of wastage, a problem which is growing all the time both in terms of purchase and in terms of discharge on medical grounds. It is bedevilling the War Office all the time.

In my opinion—again, I am quite prepared to be in my usual minority—the wastage we now witness arises because Gresham's Law applies not only to financial matters in the sixteenth century, but also to Army matters and recruiting in the twentieth century. If the Secretary of State goes all out with a "hotted-up" programme of recruitment to get in recruits at all costs irrespective of standards, what does he expect to happen? Exactly what has happened.
We need not look much further than what was said in an article which appeared in The Times early this year and a subsequent article by its defence correspondent, published on 13th March, giving an account of a visit he made to the Green Jackets depôt at Winchester.
Does my hon. Friend the Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. M. Foot) wish to intervene? It is very difficult to make speeches when there is the constant sound of interruptions.

Mr. M. Foot: I apologise to my hon. Friend. I was merely suggesting that perhaps the defence correspondent of The Times might have got his figures from my hon. Friend.

Mr. Wigg: If my hon. Friend wants to interrupt, I do not mind in the least, but constant distraction by asinine noises puts me off when I am trying to advance a reasonable argument. If my hon. Friend does not want to listen, he need not.
The point I was making was that the experience recounted by the defence correspondent of The Times, when he visited the Green Jackets depôt, was an indication of the shape of things to come. I suggest to my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East that, in his researches, he should bear in mind that, for example, the wastage which occurs when a soldier is discharged because his services are no longer required, or because he is medically unfit, does not really take effect in the same month as he enlists. Thus, if there is an increase in April and then a run-down, it will come about three months later rather than in the month in which the men came in.
There is undoubtedly a very serious wastage problem. For that reason, if for no other, it is absolutely certain that the Secretary of State will not get his


165,000 men. There is no question whatever about that. But that in itself is not important. What is important to both the Secretary of State and the nation is not the figure of 165,000, but that the training should be right. The right hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that the 165,000 is a bogus figure. The real target figure must be 182,000 if we are to discharge our commitments and the present order of battle is to be carried.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) constantly talks about welfare. This is a very important factor, but, again, one must consider the matter with care. I ask hon. Members to think back to what were called the Hore-Belisha reforms before the war, when everything conceivable was done to step up recruiting. Men of a lower educational and mental standard were to be taken on. A special depot was established where the men were given increased rations and extra milk. They were even encouraged to undergo minor operations to fit themselves for Army life. Increased ration allowances were given and walking out uniform was provided. Everything conceivable was done, but there was no effect on recruiting at all.
The only thing which brought about an increase in recruiting was the advent of Munich. When it became clear to the young men where their duty lay, they responded. I have noted before the interesting fact that in post-war years the only real impetus in the recruiting figures came after Suez. This is why I have said on many occasions—I apologise for boring hon. Members with it again—that, if their duty is pointed out to the young men of this country, they will do as their forefathers did; but if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, if we are forced to listen to the kind of soft options offered today, who can wonder that the young men do not come in, or that those who do are not the ones we want?

Dr. Alan Glyn: We are all very concerned about recruiting and wastage but, quite frankly, I cannot see how the Amendment would affect the problem in any way. We must face the fact that, after a man joins the Army, he does not really appreciate the benefits

of Army life until he has become a trained soldier. I should have liked to have gone very much further and made the period six months, with a sliding scale of payment for discharge. When a man joins the Army, the time he finds most unpleasant, I think, is the first few months, when he is subject to the various restrictions which he must undergo. It takes him four, five or six months before he realises that he is enjoying the Army and benefiting from it. Two months is all too short a period.
Before we leave the subject of recruiting and wastage, I should like to say to my right hon. Friend—he may well be aware of it already—that it is most important that conditions in the first three months should be good. I do not say that they should be soft, but I feel that conditions in the Army should be improved, as I know that my right hon. Friend is endeavouring to improve them. I hope I shall not be ruled out of order if I say that I regard one of the principal requirements during the first three months of Service life is the provision of married quarters. Many young men who join the Army at the age of 18 are already married or are about to marry. Whether we like it or not, we must accept the fact that in the modern world people marry very much earlier than they used to do. The lack of married quarters will be one of the principal factors causing men to leave within the first three months.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I cannot quite follow the hon. Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn). He wants the period raised from two months to six months, under the impression that the longer a soldier stays in the Army the more acclimatised he becomes and the more likely he is to enjoy it. I think that that is the argument.

Dr. Alan Glyn: To settle down.

Mr. Hughes: Exactly. How does the hon. Gentleman explain the fact that National Service has not made soldiers who have been in the Army for two years like the Army? The figures are in no doubt. Only a very small percentage of National Service soldiers who had been in for two years stayed because they had got to like the Army as time went on. I fail to see how that argument applies.

Dr. Glyn: Those figures are difficult to interpret because a large number of men did join for three years.

Mr. Hughes: If that were so, and if sufficient had joined for three years, the problem would not have arisen. We should not have been here today discussing it. The plain fact is that the more most people see of the Army the less they like it.

6.30 p.m.

Sir O. Prior-Palmer: Reverting to the question of the six months or two months, there is one comment I wish to make in case my right hon. Friend does not make it when he replies. Many members of the Select Committee, of which I had the great pleasure of being Chairman, wanted to increase the period to six months. It was pointed out in the evidence, and those who have read the evidence will have seen the arguments perfectly clearly set out, that the advisers for the War Office said that it was an impracticable suggestion, for the very simple reason that a very large number of these recruits would go abroad before that period of six months was ended, and possibly would be there for only six weeks before they would have to make up their minds to come home again, causing disruption to the Army as a whole, which would not be acceptable. That was the reason why we did not press our idea of extending this period to six months.

Mr. Profumo: In the course of the discussion which we have had on this Amendment, I have been asked to say something about what we are trying to do to help recruits, and also to say something about the effect which the television advertising campaign has had or has not had on the wastage figures. I had thought that I could do that better in our debate on the Question "That the Clause stand part of the Bill", but it may be for the convenience of the Committee if I do it now, so perhaps hon. Members will forgive me if I take a little longer than I would otherwise have done.
First, I must address myself to the Amendment. It may seem a bit of a volte face that I was arguing on the last Amendment that we did not want flexibility and that on this one I am saying that I should like to retain it, but I think that it is reasonably logical. Clause 17 gives both the Army and Air

Councils the power to make regulations having exactly the same effect as the Amendment. Therefore, presumably, the only purpose of the Amendment is to take away the power to make amendments and include it as a statutory provision in the Bill, which cannot be altered except by Act of Parliament.
We must remember that the word "recruit", as used in Clause 17, is defined to include women and boys as well as adult males. The Government have accepted the recommendation of the Grigg Committee that women joining the Services should have a period of probation during which they can leave if they want to. The Select Committee expressly drafted Clause 17 in permissive terms, as the hon. Gentleman will remember, so that the conditions for boys and women might be varied. At present, a woman recruit can purchase her discharge by paying £3 during the first month after recruitment and £15 thereafter up to three months. The Amendment would not permit this, and, on that account alone, I suggest, would be wrong.
I do not like the Amendment for another reason. It is too rigid. There is something to be said for a period of six weeks and not two months, and, without wearying the Committee, I will give only one reason. For instance, it keeps in the Army no longer than is absolutely necessary a man who considers that he has made a genuine mistake, and such people can have a disruptive effect if they are kept on in the Army if they are no good as soldiers. I am sure that the same applies to the Royal Air Force.
The hon. Gentleman will remember that the Select Committee was told by Army witnesses that "six to eight weeks" was judged to be the most suitable period to stipulate before the right to claim discharge could be exercised. The two months' provision in Clause 17 is a maximum limit, and I should wish to be able to vary that downwards if it were thought advisable at a later date. There might well come a time when it would be judged better for recruiting to have either no ban at all, or a ban of one month only. I do not know, but I do know that no one can forecast accurately the success of a ban of six weeks or two months. There must be room for manœuvre in the light of


experience and when the comprehensive study being produced by the Army Operational Research Group becomes available.
There is one other point. Although we are dealing with the Army and Air Force Bill, there is a difference between the two Services, which is another reason why I should like some latitude. The Royal Air Force does not operate this Clause in the same way as the Army. It has not so much reason to do so, but the position may be reversed later. If we make it statutory and do not allow the Army Council or the Air Council the manœuverability for which I ask on this occasion—and it is only for that reason—I believe that we shall defeat our own end.
So much for the guts of the Amendment. When we are talking about a wider aspect—and I am sorry that the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has had to leave, because this is something in which he is interested—unfortunately, the Select Committee was right to share my concern at the high loss of recruits. As hon. Members will have seen, in Appendix 8 to the Report, the percentage of recruits buying their discharge more than quadrupled in the four years 1957–60.
There are two aspects to recruiting, to both of which the hon. Member for Dudley referred—the tap and the plug. By and large, I am glad to tell the Committee that the flow from the tap is fairly satisfactory. It is the plug which we have to take care of; we simply have got to do something about the wastage of recruits. Some go for medical reasons, and some because they are hopelessly unsuited to the military life. There is not much that we can do about this, but the men who are buying themselves out, in the main, as I have said, are those we want to keep, and we must lose no chance of stopping this leakage down the waste-pipe.
As I think the Committee knows, I am making strenuous efforts to see that recruits are introduced into the Army in a modern and sensible way. I am not now referring to the right hon. Gentleman's statement about the shouting of N.C.O.s. We cannot have a whispering Army. I do not think that the men mind being shouted at by N.C.O.s. I went to a

camp last weekend with the Territorial Army, and I found that the regimental sergeant-major shouted just as much at Territorials as at the Regular men. I asked whether the men minded being shouted at, and the answer was, "They do not mind it at all, as long as they respect the man who is shouting." I think that the whole point of this is respect, rather than bad language.

Mr. Shinwell: The impression I got when I was going round was that they probably did not mind being shouted at when engaged in ordinary parades and drills, or whatever it may be, but they did not like being shouted at in the presence of visitors. I feel that way myself. One does not mind being shouted at, or castigated, but one does mind being shouted at or castigated in the present of other people.

Mr. Profumo: The right hon. Gentleman has been shouted at in the presence of other people far more than anybody else in this House, and he has not taken it in bad part. This is an occupational hazard which soldiers and politicians share alike.
There are some sensible arrangements that we can make. The Committee might like to know that selected officers with previous training establishment experience have now undergone special "job-introduction training" in the sphere of civil industry. They have spent a month visiting the training establishments of all arms and services in Home Commands, and as a result of what they have learned and found, I have already arranged to make certain changes.
In particular, we will now concentrate on seeing that the new recruit is properly welcomed into the Army and made to feel part of it straight away. We shall have an officer in every squad who will be responsible—in most cases, this is going on already—for individual recruits, dealing with his welfare, keeping in touch with his family and seeing generally how he is getting on. I think that this is what the right hon. Gentleman and most hon. Members of the Committee were getting at. It is not a question of how long we have or how much we pay, but of what we can do in introducing the recruits in a sensible and modern manner.

Mr. Paget: The Royal Navy has worked this system in the form of individual officers for years, and perhaps that may be the reason why naval recruiting is so much more satisfactory.

Mr. Profumo: I cannot agree to that at all. What we are trying to do as a result of people going through civilian "job-introduction courses" is to ensure that things are done for the Army on a sensible and modern basis. I think that the Navy is rather different. They shove the men off to sea, and they cannot get away. They put them in a boat, and there they are.

Mr. Mayhew: What the Minister says is very much in line with the views expressed strongly on this side of the Committee, but could he say whether these "job-introduction officers" will study not only civilian industries which have had success, but those units of the Army which have had success in maintaining recruits far the first three months? The problem is not to bring them up to the civilian standard, but to bring up the standard of the least successful units to the standard of the best. Are they training in that matter?

Mr. Profumo: I hope that the hon. Gentleman will allow me to develop this point, because I think that it is relevant. The job-introduction units are doing everything possible to pull the strings together and to ensure that where things are going well it is widely applied. In this day and age we must ensure as far as possible that the Armed Forces are wholly in line with what has been learned in civil life and industry. By and large, I think that this is happening. I hope that the Committee will not take what I have been saying as a criticism of what has been going on in the Armed Forces. We are constantly trying to make things better.
The way to plug the hole is to be sure that we are doing everything we can to introduce people in a sensible way. To this end, the new recruit will receive more guidance than in the past. Lectures and early instruction will be designed to arouse his interest and appreciation of the aim and purpose of the Army as such. More films, interesting training, handling of weapons from the start, visits to other Army units, demonstrations, regular games periods

and similar activities will be fitted into a reasonable working week. Periods for cleaning equipment will be included in working programmes.
Many other steps are being taken to encourage and guide the new recruit and to ensure that interest and purpose are the keynotes of his introduction to the Army, not boredom and hours spent on unnecessary petty chores. My aim is to ensure that this interest and purpose are kept up throughout his Army career so that, if possible, the soldier will decide to stay in the Army when his enlistment as such comes to an end. That is the other end—the prolongation. This is important. The human element will sometimes mean that we fall short of the ideal, but I am satisfied that all in positions of authority in the Regular Army are striving towards this end.
Besides these efforts, it seems to me that we need to make sure that the recruit gives the Army a fair trial and sees its advantages. That is why we want the eight weeks, and I want the right to be able to bring it back to six weeks, if necessary, to see that all recruits give the Army a fair trial and get over the teething troubles and difficulties of transition from the Welfare State, civilian life, to Army life, and that, later, they will be proud to be members of the Armed Forces.
I have been asked to give the effect of the television recruiting campaign. I am glad to say that there is nothing that suggests that this is a matter of easy come, easy go, as some hon. Members might think would be the case. It is too early yet for me to be definite, but, wherever we tried television advertising, recruiting went up by about 20 per cent. for some time during the campaign and for some time after it. If we were losing large numbers of people recruited through television, which might be thought to be the case if we were inducing into the Army more people than might normally have come into it, surely our wastage figures would be going up by leaps and bounds, commensurate with the 20 per cent. increase.
During the first four months of this year we have lost rather fewer recruits than we did in a similar period in 1960. One of the troubles is that we cannot recognise a television recruit. He has not square eyes, or a cathode tube nose. It is not possible to tell exactly what


sort of man he is. One thing, however, is clear, and that is that it is a most important factor in attracting men into the Army. The extra recruits are not leaving in large numbers when the novelty of the advertised brand has worn off.
Perhaps the Committee will forgive me for having digressed, but in discussing a small point—whether I should be allowed the opportunity of varying the eight weeks to six weeks or whether, as on the last Amendment, the figure should be more than £20—we must do it against the general background of how we are to deal with the wastage. I have tried to give the Committee some of the ways in which my colleagues on the Army Council and I are trying to deal with this important point so that we can keep the recruits because they want to be soldiers rather than that we should in some other way force them to stay.
For the reasons which I have given, I must advise the Committee to reject the Amendment.

Dr. Alan Glyn: I should like to ask my right hon. Friend a question on married accommodation. He is approaching the Army in a modern way, but often men join the Army thinking that they will have married accommodation. When they find that this is not so, they decide that the Army is not the career for them.

Mr. Profumo: I am sorry that I did not deal with that point. This is a very difficult matter which is tied up with the modern Welfare State. Before we know where we are, we shall have to provide married quarters in the schools, because people are getting married younger and younger.
The difficulty is to keep up with the building programme. The Army has embarked on the greatest building programme in the whole of its history, but, even though we are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds, it is bound to be some years before we can catch up. I am sure that our first interest must be with the men who have already become soldiers and are in fighting units serving outside this country. We are providing very many more married quarters titan ever before. I hope that in two years in B.A.O.R. and England alone there will be no waiting list.

6.45 p.m.

Mr. Wigg: I was interested in the remarks of the Secretary of State about wastage. Unfortunately, they do not tally with the statistical breakdown. There is no doubt that there is a direct relationship between wastage and the sort of quality of recruit that one gets. To take the wastage among the Foot Guards, it is 2·9 per cent. for purchase, 2·6 per cent. for medical reasons and 2·9 per cent. for other reasons, a total of 8·4 per cent. If one goes to the other end of the scale—I do not say that in an unkindly way—for the Royal Pioneer Corps the figures are 1·3 per cent. for purchase, 4·8 per cent. for medical reasons and 10·3 per cent. for other reasons, making a total of 16·4 per cent. There is no doubt that there is a correlation between wastage and the quality of the recruit.
I think that there is also no doubt that, whether deliberately or otherwise, the Army has lowered its standard, both educationally and medically. The right hon. Gentleman may remember that in his speech on the Estimates he threatened this, and I asked him one or two questions about it. I believe that he has done it. Unfortunately, if this becomes widely accepted there is no way back. That is one of the reasons why I think that the Government should seriously consider the manpower problems, because they may, for political reasons, take a step which, at the end of the day, may prove disastrous.

Mr. Profumo: First, let me deal with what the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) calls my threat that we would lower standards. What I was doing was to try to tell the House that there were means other than that of selective service that we should have to examine. I gave this as an example.
I take the opportunity now of assuring hon. Members that I have done no such thing. I know that the hon. Gentleman is deeply devoted to the Army. I hope that he will not give credence to this belief. I am sure that he will welcome the opportunity of being able to say to those people who suggest that this is what I have done that I have not, in fact, done it.
All that I was attempting to do in my speech was to try to show that, whereas we have had an increase of about 20 per cent. in recruits, directly


attributable, I think, to television, if they had all been recruits who were going to be no good as soldiers, and that they were merely lured into the Army by advertising, we would expect to see a high increase in the number of purchasers out.
I said that in the first quarter of this year, which was the time of the television campaign, the number of people who purchased themselves out was fractionally less than the number in the same period in 1960. To that extent, it must show that a large number of the television recruits are good and will stick. I was making only that point.

Mr. Paget: Is it not a slightly alarming prospect to have an Army of people so feckless that they allow their career to be settled by a goggle-box?

Mr. Profumo: I did not say that either. Perhaps the hon. and learned Member has not looked at the Army recruiting films on television. We are not seeking to engage in pressure television advertising. All we are doing is to call attention to the life of service which the Army provides, and that, I believe, is why many more people who have service at heart are deciding to come forward. They are not feckless. They will make good soldiers.

Mr. Mayhew: If, as the Secretary of State indicates, we have a 20 per cent. increase in recruiting without a significant rise in wastage, that is encouraging. When did the national television coverage begin? My impression is that it was towards the end of February. The figures quoted to us by the right hon. Gentleman were for the first quarter of the year. To me, they do not seem to be so reassuring. If the television recruiting began at the end of February, the rate of purchase of discharge for the first quarter of this year would not be relevant. Perhaps the Minister was in error.
The figures I quoted—I agree that it is difficult to make them clear—about the increase in the strength of the Regular Army tended to show precisely the opposite, namely, that when television recruiting increased in March and April the strength of the Regular Army did not increase in parallel. Therefore, we should regard these facts for the time being as provisional.
There were a number of points in the Minister's speech which will give pleasure on both sides of the Committee. The approach to the necessity for acclimatising recruits is a point which was made several times on Second Reading. The right hon. Gentleman's remarks about married quarters were not so encouraging. A recent visit to Germany convinced me that the failure to provide married quarters is by far the most important obstacle to recruiting.
The striking fact is, not so much that we have a great building programme in hand, but that fifteen years after the end of the war we should still not be able to provide married quarters for every one of our soldiers serving overseas and at home. In view, however, of the more constructive parts of the Secretary of State's statement, I do not think that my hon. Friend's would wish me to press the Amendment at this time.

Mr. Wigg: The Secretary of State's figures concerning purchase are not borne out by the facts. It is true that discharges by purchase under Section 14 have tended to tail off this year, having gone from 1,650 in 1958–59 to 2,208 and, now, to 2,056; but discharges by purchase other than under Section 14 have increased during the same period from 567 to 676 and to 1,093. In the course of two years, therefore, they have almost doubled. That is why the right hon. Gentleman cannot find any direct correlation between the increase and the rising strength of the Army. The figures are on a different basis. One figure includes boys, the other figures do not.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Can the Secretary of State give us any information about the trades and industries from which the increased number of recruits for the Army has been obtained? For example, are we recruiting from vital national industries which are essential for the production of goods for the world market? In some areas, we still need more miners. While we need more miners for the mines, are we attracting them into the Army by television and, consequently, getting less coal? Are we depleting skilled labour and intelligent people from industries which most need them?
Perhaps it will be possible for the Minister to give us information about the industries from which these additional recruits have been attracted. If


they have been obtained from vital national industries, the Secretary of State is weakening the national economy and there is no gain at all.

Amendment negatived.

Mr. Paget: I beg to move, in page 15, line 32, at the end, to insert:
but the period of the Proclamation shall not count as part of the three months commencing at the date of attestation, and the recruit shall be entitled to 'exercise' the right conferred by this section during the first three months of his service during which the proclamation under section ten of this Act shall not he in force".
This Amendment is designed to clarify a point which is not clear. If a man joins the Army and, on the second day of his service, the Government decide that an operation of a Suez nature is necessary and a proclamation is issued which lasts three months, and at the end of that proclamation period the man decides that he is in the wrong job, does he get out for £20 or does he have to pay £250? In other words, is a proclamation a mere suspension of the three-month period, which will begin to run again at the end of the proclamation, or is the proclamation period a cancellation of the three-month period?
The acceptance of my Amendment would make it clear that the proclamation is a mere suspension and that when the proclamation period had concluded, the man who had not been in the Army for three months at the beginning of the proclamation would have the time that he had lost available to him at the end of the proclamation period.

Mr. Wigg: The Amendment certainly would have some odd effects. Had it been operative at the outbreak of war and a soldier had joined in July, 1939, and the proclamation had then been made, it would still have been operative when he was time-expired six years later. In those circumstances, the precedent is a dangerous one. Let us go back to the previous war, which lasted four years. If the whole of the Army had enlisted in the months preceding the war, on payment of a given sum they would have been able to get themselves out during the demobilisation period when the Regular troops were wanted.
It would seem to me, therefore—this is just the luck of the draw, as it were—

that the three months should be three months from the date of enlistment. God forbid that we should envisage a third world war, but it could happen in a limited way—for example, during a war like the Korean War. Particularly with short-service men on three-year engagements in the Guards and special units, a most difficult administrative problem might be created by the Amendment.

7.0 p.m.

Mr. Profumo: I hope that I may answer fairly quickly. The provision in subsection (1, b) states that if a soldier claims his discharge under Section 14 of the 1955 Act within his first three months, and there is a proclamation under Section 10, he must wait until the soldiers kept with the colours by the proclamation are transferred to the Reserve before he can actually be discharged. This rule is already in the Acts and has been in force, as far as I know, ever since there has been statutory provision for discharge by purchase.
I am not introducing a new proviso. The Clause merely repeats what exists now under the law. If a man joins up, he has three months during which he can purchase his release. If, during those three months, however, there is a proclamation, wholly or in part, and during that three months' period he makes up his mind that he wants to leave, he is not allowed to go until the proclamation comes to an end. He still gets his three months in which to make up his mind. It would be wrong to start the period again after the end of three months, however.

Mr. Paget: This explanation satisfies me entirely. I understand that during the period of a proclamation a man might give his notice, but that it is not operable during that period. It is a little obscure, but I am entirely satisfied, and I therefore beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 18 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 19.—(FORFEITURE OF SUMS FROM PAY BY WAY OF PUNISHMENT.)

Mr. Wigg: I beg to move, in page 17, line 38, at the end to insert:
(2) Section sixty-nine of each of the Acts (conduct to prejudice of military discipline)


(conduct to prejudice of air-force discipline) shall be amended by the addition at the end of the section of the words "except that punishment imposed under this section shall not include forfeiture of sums from pay".
This Amendment would widen a provision that the Royal Air Force has had for a long time and which it has sought to extend. I can understand why the R.A.F. wants to do it. It wants to substitute a fine for major punishment instead of detention which might deprive it of a man's service. I pointed out to the 1955 Select Committee that I understood why the R.A.F. needed the power, but that it was clear that the breaches of discipline with which it was concerned were of a rather different form from those in the Army, and that already the Army had very considerable punitive powers.
I set out to make a list of deductions, which is repeated in Appendix 2 on page 71 of the Select Committee's Report. That list is comprehensive, but there are one or two additions, such as the maintenance deductions under Sections 150 and 151 of the 1955 Army Act. There are also circumstances in which a prisoner of war can forfeit his pay. There are deductions which are not penal deductions, since, under the Pay Warrant and the allowance regulations, public debts can be recovered from soldiers. In addition, Sections 147 and 148 of the Army Act give a list of regulations under which a soldier can be fined.
I do not raise my voice against the reform by which a fine may be imposed for the same kind of offence and at the same rate as that which would be imposed in a civil court, and my Amendment does not seek to limit that reform. In the Rhine Army, many soldiers have cars or motor cycles and find themselves before the courts for breach of traffic regulations. If this happened at home, they would be fined, and I have no objection to military courts fining them in the same way. It is perfectly true that the proposals in Clause 19 are modest in character. They propose only to fine up to a period of fourteen days pay, and then the soldier, quite rightly, will have the right to elect. It is equally clear that the Army Council has sought to be sure that no soldier or officer should be put in a position of being without money because of deductions for a fine.
The provisions in that respect are contained in Army Order No. 109 of 1956, made under virtue of powers conferred on the Army Council by Section 144 of the Amy Act, but it is worth noting that the rates contained in Army Order 109 were about three increases of pay back. I should have thought that, as increases of pay are given, the amounts of money levied in fines on officers, warrant officers, N.C.O.s and other ranks should rise as well, so as to be related to pay. If pay is 6d. a day and a man is left with 2d. in his pocket, then he is well off, but if the pay is £1 a day and he still has only 2d. he will be very poor.
The Secretary of State should look at the figures contained in Order 109. The Select Committee was given these rates as a safeguard to ensure that a soldier would not sink below a certain minimum. There is one very curious thing about the rates. I mention it because we are to have a battalion of Gurkhas, or part of a brigade—a composite unit—coming to this country.

Mr. Paget: May I ask my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) what Amendment he is moving?

Mr. Wigg: I am seeking to limit the imposition of fines. I am dealing with the background to fines and with the point made to the Select Committee concerning the minimum pay laid down in Army Order No. 109, of 1956.

Mr. Paget: It has certainly appeared to me that the question of fines generally, and of what should be left to a man in the Army, comes under a later Amendment, to line 42. The question under the Amendment which is being moved by my hon. Friend—to which I have also attached my name—is whether fines are an appropriate punishment to one form of Army crime—"conduct to the prejudice".

The Temporary Chairman (Sir Godfrey Nicholson): I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget). If it is agreeable to the Committee, we might perhaps consider the other two Amendments to Clause 19, in page 19, line 8, to leave out paragraph (b), and in line 42, at end to add:
Provided always that in no circumstances shall fines, stoppages and forfeitures of pay be


so operated as to leave a soldier or airman with less than four shillings per day
and also the Amendment to Clause 27, in page 23, line 12, at end to insert:
Provided always that such person shall receive a minimum of four shillings per day.
That would put the hon. Member for Dudley's speech in order.

Mr. Wigg: On a point of order. The Amendment I have moved raises quite a different point, Sir Godfrey. The minimum amount of cash which is left to a man at the moment is laid down by the Army Council under Section 144 of the Act. It is not limited to a particular amount per day. What my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) wants to do in the Amendment to Clause 27 is to lay down that a man who has been fined shall still receive a minimum of 4s. per day.

The Temporary Chairman: It would clearly be out of order to discuss that on this Amendment. The Amendment which has been moved by the hon. Member deals only with the principle of punishment imposed, It does not include the quantities.

Mr. Paget: Further to that point of order, Sir Godfrey. Your suggestion that these other Amendment should be discussed at the same time as the one moved by my hon. Friend is a good idea, particularly in view of the general line taken by my hon. Friend. The others fit in perfectly well with our discussion.

The Temporary Chairman: Then, if it is agreeable to the Committee, we shall also discuss the Amendments I have mentioned. I suggest that the hon. Member for Dudley now continues his speech.

Mr. Wigg: I was dealing with the point that a brigade group of Gurkhas is coming to this country during this year and that the minimum rates of pay left to them are not unimportant. Under Army Order 109 of 1956, they would be left with 3d. a day. The Royal Warrant of 1940 and the A.C.I. to Article 952 laid down that the minimum which could be left to a non-European soldier was to be 4d. a day, so that the minimum rates of pay which can be left to a non-European soldier are now less than they were before the war.
I do not want to stress this too much, but I should have thought that the right hon. Gentleman would be good enough to indicate that the Army Council would consider the rates of pay to be left to a soldier who was fined. I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman will accept the proposal for 4s. a day, but the position of the Gurkhas should be considered.
A charge brought under Section 69 is of conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. That is one of the vaguest and most often prayed in aid that the Army knows. It is a portmanteau charge, and when there is nothing else, it is always in the background. It is one of the mainstays of discipline and fines under it should not be imposed by the Army for purely disciplinary reasons.
Army experience of handling young men compares very favourably with what happens in civilian life. In a good regiment—one has had the privilege of serving in them—there is practically no crime, but there is the sanction of discipline which makes it a good regiment and which has the effect of preventing crime. If crime occurs, it is dealt with fairly and in a way which all men can see, with the result that there is not much crime.
In other words, a young man doing his C.B.—the name is now changed to restriction of privileges—for a breach of discipline has broken what is probably the first rule of the military code—he has been caught. He stands there as a warning to others. If on charges of this nature the Army starts to impose fines merely because the Royal Air Force does so and because the Army has been pressured into accepting something which was resisted by the 1955 Select Committee, a serious backdoor breach will have been made into Army discipline.
There is no doubt that the discipline which the Army requires—certainly in combatant units—is very different from that which the Air Force wants, or which the Services want. A future writer, probably from Peking, on the decline and fall of the British Empire, when dealing in his military section with the weakening of the discipline of the British Armed Forces, may put his finger on this as one of the methods which led


seriously to a weakening of discipline—if he is a good enough researcher.
There was an event this week which provoked no response at all. On the front page of the Daily Mirror, which, as everyone knows, is always concerned with the public good, there was a photograph of a young soldier of the Household Cavalry with a very attractive young lady by his side. He had been put on a charge under Section 69. So little was thought of the fact that a leading article said that the charge was rubbish that no one said a word. I should have thought that it was contempt of court and that charges and punishments framed under the authority of the Army Council were just as serious and just as much part of the process of law as a charge heard in a court of summary jurisdiction, or at a court-martial or High Court.
If in the exercise of his authority an officer decides that a matter needs to be investigated, it should be treated seriously and handled in such a way as not merely to inflict a wound or punishment on the individual concerned, but also to set an example. The Army Act is not merely a code of discipline, but a way of life. The way it is framed and the whole purpose of framing it and its very being is to buttress men and give them strength of character, perhaps strength in their weaknesses, at moments when they are faced with terror. If it does not do that and is not recognised as that, it is nothing. The problem of the Air Force is completely different. It has to keep aircraft in the air. If a man has been on the binge, the Air Force does not want to stop him flying and so a fine is appropriate, but that will not do for the Brigade of Guards, or the crack infantry regiments.

Dr. Alan Glyn: In the case the hon. Gentleman has quoted it was a technical offence and the man was charged so that he could have an opportunity to state his case and say exactly what happened.

7.15 p.m.

Mr. Wigg: I do not know anything about the circumstances. All I know is that it is not good for the discipline of the Army that the matter should be treated in this way. I am saying that it is not good for the Army that disciplinary offences should be treated lightly

or dealt with merely by stinging a fellow 5s. and charging it against his account. That has no effect. The short, sharp punishment which is necessary to produce discipline is quite different.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. I can understand fines being imposed for civil offences, or for the kind of offence for which a man might appear before a civil court, but I do not want fines to be a punishment for offences concerned solely with a man's behaviour and with his discipline and with the whole tone of the unit of which he is a part. I draw the line at Section 69, because the offences which that covers are purely disciplinary. With the Secretary of State in his present mood, I do not expect to make much progress with my Amendment, but I hope that future reformers will take a little more care than the right hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Paget: I have a good deal of sympathy with the point of view of my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) that while fines are a valuable and even useful addition to available punishments, they are not in general appropriate to strictly disciplinary offences such as those normally covered by Section 69.
The case my hon. Friend has mentioned concerned a horse, Alexander the Great, and his photograph with an attractive young lady. I hope that that sort of matter is not dealt with by Section 69. This was a breach of orders. Merely because an act may affect the sense of dignity of an officer is no reason for making it an offence punishable by a fine or anything else.
Fines are not a suitable penalty under Section 69. I did not think of it when I was on the Select Committee considering fines generally, but, having discussed it with my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley since, I feel that that was an omission on our part. Fines are not a suitable punishment for offences under that Section.
I now deal with the Amendment and this question of not allowing deductions. Whether they be fines or affiliation orders or anything else, it is wrong to leave a man without any money, because when that happens the trouble starts. He starts by "flogging" his own kit, and moves on to "flogging" his


comrades' kit. All kinds of trouble arise because a situation has been created in which life has become intolerable for him. A minimum which enables a man to live a military life in tolerable conditions should always be reserved for him. That is important to the discipline of the Army.
My Amendment cannot, of course, be accepted. I never for a moment thought that it could. One cannot put in a vague figure like this. There must be qualifications and various other things, but I want an assurance put into the Bill that the first consideration will be the discipline of the Army, and the discipline of the Army requires that once a man is in the Army life for him is tolerable. This involves having some level of spending power. I make no point about what the level should be, but the principle behind my Amendment is that life should be tolerable for him. I leave it to the Secretary of State to decide what form the Amendment should take, but I think that he should accept the principle of my Amendment.

Mr. Cronin: I propose to confine myself to the Amendment moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg). All who have had any responsibility for the discipline of troops or airmen will agree that the charge of conduct to the prejudice of military discipline, or conduct to the prejudice of Air Force discipline, is a valuable form of charge in maintaining units at a high level of efficiency and dealing with various matters which are obviously prejudicial to the state of the unit but which cannot be framed as a specific charge.
This form of charge, although it may be valuable from a military point of view, is unsatisfactory from the point of view of justice and equity. The charge is often too vague. The evidence is often of a subjective nature. An officer may feel that some act or form of conduct is prejudicial to military discipline when he is in one mood, but may not consider it to be a breach of discipline when he is in a different mood. This variation of mood may occur in the tropics or under conditions which lead to a certain irascibility on the part of the officer who makes the charge.
If one considers the type of offence being used for this purpose, they seem of a vague nature. For instance, page 314 of the Manual of Air Force Law says that
being in improper possession of Public or service property or of property belonging to an officer or comrade where there is no evidence of actual theft,
is an offence. Someone who had not stolen anythng could be charged wth being in possession of property.
Again
A person who drives a service vehicle without authority or, while on an authorised journey, improperly deviates from his authorised route, or, where no route has been laid down, from the shortest and most direct route, commits an offence against this section.
Another common offence under this Section is
behaving with undue familiarity towards an airman subject to the accused's authority.
All those are somewhat vague charges. It would be better if they were framed as charges of a specific nature, but under this umbrella they no longer hold the precision which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. There is a possibility of injustice when this form of charge is used. I have no doubt that the injustice is kept to a minimum, but it is the responsibility of those who are concerned with the welfare of soldiers and airmen to ensure that this injustice is kept to the minimum possible, and that if it occurs the effects are very slight.
It is important that the penalties for the charge of conduct to the prejudice of military discipline should be kept to the minimum. It might be argued that under Section 69 of the Army Act a court martial can impose a heavy penalty for this charge—up to two years' imprisonment—but I think it will be found that they rarely use this penalty unless it is an offence of a heinous nature. The tendency is to impose the lesser penalty. For officers it is usually a severe reprimand instead of a loss of seniority, and a lesser penalty instead of detention for soldiers.
The Amendment will therefore have the effect of more leniency being exercised by courts martial when dealing with for this charge. It will also prevent sums of money being forfeited in expiation of an offence tried summarily at unit level, because such a procedure is subject to the accused person being


able to be tried by court martial if he so wishes. The general effect of the Amendment will be to decrease the penalty for conduct to the prejudice of military or Air Force discipline.
Another aspect is that if it were permissible to use the forfeiture of a sum of money as a penalty for conduct to the prejudice of Air Force or military discipline, there would be a tendency to use this charge more frequently instead of a more specific and carefully defined charge. The Amendment will lead to a more liberal attitude towards this form of charge which most of us find rather unpalatable from the point of view of pure justice.

Mr. Mayhew: As nothing has been said in explanation of the Amendment in page 19, line 8, perhaps I might briefly explain that as the Bill stands it makes it impossible for an officer to forfeit, say, both seniority and pay as an alternative to dismissal. I have no doubt that the thought behind it is that loss of seniority involves financial loss—sometimes quite serious and continuing.
Nevertheless, in the Second Reading debate the Secretary of State said that if it is wished this punishment may be awarded in conjunction with other punishments, and that the Bill gives powers to courts-martial to award forfeiture of pay and a reprimand or a severe reprimand. We do not think that this kind of combination of the two punishments would be used frequently, but we see no reason for tying the hands of the judicial authorities in this way. We suggest that this option should be left open to them.

7.30 p.m.

Mr. Profumo: I will try to deal one by one with the various Amendments which are being taken together. I start with that in the name of the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg). This proposal is not satisfactory. The main object of the introduction of the new punishments is to bridge a gap in the present scale of punishments—a gap which extends between forfeiture of seniority and severe reprimand in the case of officers, warrant-officers and non-commissioned officers, and detention and minor punishments, such as the restriction of privileges and extra guard

duties, in the case of soldiers. That gap is too wide, and it applies in case of offences under Section 69 and military offences in general, in exactly the same way as in the case of offences, including civil offences, under any other Section.
The most frequent use of Section 69 is made in respect of charges which allege the improper possession of another soldier's property and the misuse of Service transport. Both offences qualify for the title of civil rather than military. The hon. Member's assumption that Section 69 caters for military offences only is, with respect, incorrect. Charges are sometimes laid under that Section that could be laid under other Sections, and it would be wrong if the type of punishment resulting were to depend on the wording of the charge. I consider that the forfeiture of sums from pay—or fines—will be a useful punishment for first offences under Section 69 that require more than the award of ordinary punishments, even when the offences are of a military nature.
I realise that some offences, including those charged under Section 69, will deserve a military punishment, such as detention, rather than a civil punishment, such as the forfeiture of a sum from pay, but I consider that commanding officers must be left to work out these problems for themselves as individual cases arise. I intend to issue administrative instructions drawing attention to the point, and those instructions will emphasise that the new punishment must be imposed with discretion, and that it is not a suitable method of dealing with serious breaches of military discipline.
Although, logically, it is possible to try to draw a distinction between civil and military offences, I find it difficult to see any reason why Section 69 should be separated from all the other Sections dealing with military offences. For example, mutiny and the incorrect wearing of headdress—the latter of which would be charged under Section 69—are both military offences, although they differ greatly in their seriousness. Those are the reasons why I cannot accept the hon. Member's Amendment.
In the course of what he was saying he drew attention to something upon which I ought to comment. I agree with him in what he said about the very trivial


case that arose a weekend ago, concerning a guardsman and his horse—including the vital statistics of the horse—and their being photographed with a young lady. The triviality of the case was blown up because a newspaper story was made out of it. I am not trying to say what newspapers should do or should not do. I am all for their criticising. In fact, in the same edition of that newspaper there was a very fair account of life in the modern Army.
Nevertheless, I agree that controversial comment at that stage is as undesirable and reprehensible as similar comment made during a trial by court-martial. A commanding officer will have to decide whether to deal with a case summarily or to remand it for court-martial, and comments such as this might cause unfair pressure to be brought to bear upon him. In my view, it might even be not without danger to the author. I am happy to say that the case referred to was dismissed, as it probably should have been. I do not think that it should ever have caught the public eye. But the point of principle with which the hon. Member dealt required some comment from me.
I turn now to the Amendment in page 19, line 8, to leave out paragraph (b). This would give power to an appropriate superior authority to award the punishment of forfeiture of seniority of rank and forfeiture of a sum from pay together. As drafted, the Bill does not provide this power. The powers of punishment it provides are, first, forfeiture of seniority, secondly, forfeiture of a sum from pay, thirdly, severe reprimand or reprimand, and, fourthly, stoppages. The superior authority may award one or more of those punishments—that is the point to which I was referring in the Second Reading debate—but he is not allowed to award forfeiture of seniority and forfeiture of a sum from pay together. I consider that appropriate superior authorities—that is to say, officers of the rank of brigadier or above and air commodore or above—already possess sufficient maximum powers of punishment.
Forfeiture of seniority may be a very severe punishment, which can affect the career of an officer or warrant officer, and can also have a severe financial effect later. It may even affect a man's

pension. No limit is placed by the Acts on the amount of seniority that is to be forfeited, though, in practice, a maximum award of one year is normal for an appropriate superior authority. There is no necessity for both punishments to be awarded together in order to produce the required degree of flexibility to which the hon. Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew) referred. It is the punishment of severe reprimand or reprimand which provides the necessary flexibility.
For example, the appropriate superior authority can choose between forfeiture of seniority and forfeiture of a sum from pay together with a severe reprimand. If he wishes, he can award forfeiture of seniority and a severe reprimand. Courts-martial have no power to award forfeiture of seniority and forfeiture of a sum from pay together, and I am sure that there should not be greater power in this respect for appropriate superior authorities than is given to courts-martial.
The last Amendment concerns the sum which we should be able to take from a man's total emoluments by way of fines or forfeiture of sums from pay. This question was discussed by the Select Committee, and the present situation was accepted. The Amendment seeks to lay down a minimum rate for soldiers and airmen in the Act itself, and to increase the minimum rate at present prescribed. I was glad to hear the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) say that he did not expect his Amendment to be accepted in this form. Nevertheless, I have every sympathy with the principle behind the Amendment, and am prepared to accept that principle. I undertake here and now—and I wish to put it on record—that a soldier or airman on a Regular engagement shall receive a minimum of 4s. a day.
But I do not think that 4s. can be the minimum rate for everybody. Even apart from National Service men there are certain categories of men and women—Gurkhas, locally enlisted personnel and boys—whose rates of pay are lower than those of ordinary soldiers. It will, therefore, be necessary to make special arrangements for them which will ensure that each is treated fairly in relation to others. In the end, we shall have to specify a number of rates in considerable detail.
I do not think that an Act of Parliament of five years' duration is the right place in which to lay down details about rates of pay. The Act does not deal with rates of pay anywhere else. I hope, therefore, that the Committee will continue to leave the formulation of the detailed regulations and rates to the Army Council and myself, subject to the undertaking that the soldier or airman on a Regular engagement shall receive not less than 4s. a day.
Having said that, I hope that the hon. and learned Member will feel that his principle is satisfied and will understand why I cannot accept the Amendment.

Mr. Paget: What the right hon. Gentleman has said is entirely satisfactory to me, subject to this. I was a little anxious about the reference to National Service men. The National Service man in the Army has to live with Regulars at the moment. What we are concerned with, from a disciplinary point of view, is that men should not be in a position which makes life intolerable for them. Personally, I feel that if we impose fines on, or make deductions of pay from, National Service men, the same minimum limit should apply to them as to Regulars. As to the position of Gurkhas, boys, and people like that, I entirely agree about the need for a schedule. I merely enter this caveat in regard to National Service men.

Mr. Wigg: Does the right hon. Gentleman intend to retain the existing procedure, that is to say, power vested under Section 144, but will produce another Army Order which will amend the Army Order 109/56?

Mr. Profumo: Mr. Profumo indicated assent.

Amendment negatived.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 20 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 21.—(PENALISATION OF RECEIVING PROCEEDS OF STOLEN, &C., PROPERTY.)

Mr. Paget: I beg to move, in page 20, line 19, to leave out from "include" to the end of the Clause and to add:
any property into or for which that property, to the knowledge of such person subject to military law has been converted or exchanged and the proceeds of any unlawful or fraudulent sale of that, property".

The Clause seems to me to be rather wide. I think that this Clause applies only to paragraph (b) of Section 44 of the Army Act, that is to say, to the man who receives any public or Service property knowing it to have been stolen. That is to be extended to anything that it is converted into.
If some one steals money from the Army, buys a car with it, sells the car and then stands somebody a drink out of the proceeds of the sale of the car, is that man to be held guilty, even if he knew, or had reason to suspect, that his friend was up to some monkey business? It seems to me that the words used in section 44 are too wide:
… shall include not only a reference to such property as has been originally in the possession or control of any person, but also any property into or for which that property has been converted or exchanged, and anything acquired by a conversion or exchange of that property, whether immediately or otherwise.
We are dealing with a very serious offence indeed. If one takes it to the third remove, any exchange of property—and this is the assumption in the example I gave—even if the person who had a drink knew that his friend had been up to monkey business and that the money with which he was standing his friend drinks was probably the proceeds of some sort of villainy, I do not think that is enough to make a man a receiver of stolen goods It certainly would not in civil law, and I do not see why it should in Army law.
I have suggested words which seem to me to be about wide enough. They may not be suitable, but I should be grateful if the Minister would say that he will have another look at this. The words I suggest are:
any property into or for which that property, to the knowledge of such person subject to military law has been converted or exchanged and the proceeds of any unlawful or fraudulent sale of that property.
These words seem to me to take in the larger transaction while cutting out the more minor and distant participants. I am simply asking that the right hon. Gentleman should look at this point.

7.45 p.m.

Mr. Ramsden: The idea of this Clause is to effect another amendment which experience of the working of the 1955 Act has shown, to our way of thinking,


to be desirable. Supposing that a soldier or airman stole a truck—the hon. and learned Gentleman gave a rather more recondite instance—sold it while it was in his charge and divided the proceeds among his comrades, under the present provisions of the Act charges could be preferred in those circumstances only under Section 69, or possibly Section 70. This Clause will enable charges to be brought under the appropriate Section of the 1955 Act, that is Section 44 cited by the hon. and learned Gentleman, provided that those who have received and shared the money can be proved to have known in what way it was obtained. The effect is to bring in the proceeds of the stolen property as well as the property itself.
The hon. and learned Gentleman objected to the way in which we are proposing to do this, because he thought that it was unnecessarily wide. In fact, we are proposing to do it by using almost exactly the words in the definition of property under Section 46 of the Larceny Act, 1916, which I have here, and with which I am sure the hon. and learned Gentleman is much more familiar than I am. I must confess that I looked at this with great care, knowing that this Amendment was to be moved, but I have been unable to convince myself that there is any great advantage in having different wording in the two cases, when, in this context, both are intended to fulfil very much the same purpose.
I imagined at one moment that the hon. and learned Gentleman might have been worried in case a charge could lie against a man who might receive the proceeds of some stolen property in ignorance of the fact that it was stolen, or in ignorance of its origin altogether. He got near that position when he talked about the man who might be bought a drink by someone who got the money from selling stolen property. I can reassure the hon. and learned Member, but to do so I must stick out my neck to the extent of quoting a learned authority, something which I have never done before and which I do only with great timidity. It is the case of Regina v. Cugullere, which was heard in the Court of Criminal Appeal on 17th April, 1961. It makes clear, I think, that the onus of proof of knowledge in the mind of the man accused is firmly on the prosecution. In that case, the court held that a charge

failed because the prosecution had not established knowledge.
The main point of the hon. and learned Member's argument was that we are casting the net too wide by using this wording. I hope that he will agree that in following almost exactly the wording of the Larceny Act we are doing nothing very remarkable and are in line with the civil law. I hope that, on reflection, he will not press the Amendment.

Mr. Paget: I confess that my knowledge of the criminal law was never very profound and that I did not recognise where these words came from. If they come from the Larceny Act, that is a very effective answer to my objection. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 22 to 25 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 26.—(AMENDMENTS AS TO PERSONS QUALIFIED TO HOLD INQUIRIES.)

Mr. Wigg: I beg to move, in page 21, line 25, to leave out subsection (1).
The Clause deals with a change in the regulations which, in my judgment, needs to be considered with great care. Until recently it was the practice that courts of inquiry—the term is now obsolete—or, as they are now, boards of inquiry and regimental inquiries should be composed of officers. The Clause proposes that in future it will be possible for civilians to be included in those boards. I have no objection to civilians sitting as members of regimental inquiries. I appreciate the need for it. The Army is being civilianised, and before very long there will be about 50,000 more civilians employed in the Army than there are serving personnel. It follows that in small detachments, for example, small detachments of the R.A.O.C., it may be difficult to find within easy reach officers to serve on inquiries which, after all, may be concerned with minor matters.
When the Select Committee considered the point it thought that they might be trivial matters. One member of the Select Committee suggested that the matters concerned were equivalent to the loss of a pair of field marshal's boots


That might be so if the provision were confined to regimental inquiries, but boards of inquiry could deal with matters of great importance. There is a very great difference between a civilian and an officer in these matters. The officer is subject to military law. He has to accept a code which requires him to be personally responsible for the stores placed in his charge. Indeed, he can be held to account in a financial sense for any shortcomings. But the civilian is under no such restriction.
If these powers are granted, therefore, a civilian could sit on a board of inquiry deciding matters which might subsequently be the basis of disciplinary action under the Army Act—and yet the men who comprised the board of inquiry might be actuated and trained in two different ways. We must bear in mind that an officer of the rank of captain, with which these executive officers are said to equate, would have attended courses of instruction in military law. He would have been brought up to understand and to administer military procedure. For that matter, so would the civilian. But there would be a difference; the officer, by the nature of his calling and training, would be required to take responsibility, to welcome the exercise of responsibility and to understand what it involved in taking responsible decisions for which he could afterward be brought to account.
While I accept the civilianisation of the Army, the existence of small detachments and the certainty that petty matters will from time to time arise, when serving officers will not be available, and while I accept that in minor matters such as come before a regimental inquiry civilian membership must be accepted as one of the needs of the times, it ought to stop there. Membership of boards of inquiry concerned with more important matters should be restricted to those who are themselves subject to military law—in other words, to serving officers.
My Amendment is not ideal and I am not sure that it would be acceptable in this form. If the Minister will tell me that, although he cannot accept it in this form, he agrees that there is some force in my argument for restricting civilian members to regimental inquiry,

I shall be happy to accept such an assurance and to withdraw the Amendment.

Mr. Frederick Mulley: My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has raised a very important point to which we should be given a clear answer. The matter was considered by the Select Committee, and it was understood that by administrative machinery the kind of difficulties which are envisaged would not be allowed to arise. But it raises the point of to what extent we try to provide within the Act itself for the conduct of the Army and the Air Force and to what extent we rely on the Army Council and the officers concerned.
We were never very clear about the exact functions of a board of inquiry as distinct from the much smaller regimental inquiry. While I wish to do nothing to retard the civilianisation of our forces, because it is clearly in the interests of all of us to have work done by civilians wherever possible, before we make what I think is a new departure in this way we should have a clear statement from the Under-Secretary of State about it.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) is not able to be present at the moment. However, if the Government are prepared to accept them, I am willing to move the subsequent Amendments standing in his name, in page 21, lines 25 and 26, and his Amendment to leave out lines 28 to 44. They are purely drafting Amendments.

8.0 p.m.

Sir O. Prior-Palmer: We had considerable discussion in the Select Committee about this. Like the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg), I did not like the idea of civilians serving on boards, particularly boards at a higher level than a regimental inquiry. However, if the hon. Member for Dudley reads the evidence again, he will be convinced, as we were, that today this is essential. The Army Fire Service, for example, is entirely civilianised. It can be argued that the evidence given by witnesses could be adequately assessed by serving soldiers, but because of the technical advance in the Services I am


not at all convinced, although I say this reluctantly, that it is not necessary for fairly high level civilians, who know their job inside and out, to be on the board to assist the president and other members of the board to assess the evidence.

Mr. Ramsden: The Amendment deals with a change of substance. In reply to the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) and other hon. Members who have drawn attention to this, I should like the opportunity of saying a few words in explanation of what the Government have in mind. Under Section 135 (2) of the Army Act, 1955, and the Air Force Act, 1955, membership of a board of inquiry is at present limited to persons subject to military or Air Force law or to the Naval Discipline Act. The purpose of subsection (1), which the hon. Member seeks to delete, is to supplement these persons with civilians in the service of the Crown, for reasons which have been touched on.
There is more civilianisation going on all the time in the Army. There are certain Army and Air Force units—for example, weekend training centres and married quarters administration units—where civilianisation has resulted in only one or two serving officers being available, the remainder of the senior staff consisting of civilians. There are occasions when boards of inquiry concern such units and have to be manned with officers from outside, as things are at present. This for obvious reasons is undesirable.
Further, there can be cases where civilians have particular qualifications which make it desirable that they be allowed to serve on boards of inquiry, as for example, where their use would relieve part of the heavy administrative burden on military officers, or where they might through specialist knowledge or knowledge of a foreign language assist the board in its work. I have not formed the impression from the speeches made this evening that the general principle of allowing civilians to sit on boards following the Report of the Select Committee is called into question. I realise that the hon. Member for Dudley, and perhaps others who share his apprehensions, feel that as drafted the Clause opens the door rather too wide.
However, the Government feel that it is essential to have the new power. I should like to try to persuade the hon. Member for Dudley that to some extent his apprehensions may be unjustified. First, as he knows, but I stress this, a board of inquiry is a purely domestic investigation held to assist authority, by establishing the facts of a case, to determine whether there has been negligence in complying with Service regulations or, for example, whether Service procedure and so forth should be improved. Upon the facts so discovered a decision will be made as to whether to institute judicial proceedings in a disciplinary case.
If the trial is by court martial, the court will probably never see the report or the findings of the board of inquiry. If there is a summary trial, it is true that the commanding officer may be aware of the proceedings, but judicial proceedings of this kind start from scratch and no civilian can take part in them. Civilians will have no opportunity to cause prejudice to the interests of a man who may be concerned later in a disciplinary case. The whole point of this argument is that, as soon as discipline begins to come into question, the civilian element drops out and the military element stands alone. Any action taken as the result of the holding of a board of inquiry will he initiated by a military authority who will invariably have assessed the evidence before initiating his action.
The hon. Member for Dudley said that there was a distinction between civilians and officers. He said that officers, through their training, were used to cases involving discipline and, through long habit, to a sense of responsibility. It is relevant to remind the hon. Gentleman that, even if during the proceedings of a board of inquiry it appears that some injustice may be done to a soldier or an officer, the matter can be put right at once. If the president, who must still be a military officer, begins to think at any time that things are going wrong, or that an injustice may be done to any individual, or that an invidious position may arise because an officer senior to himself is likely to be affected, he can always adjourn the board of inquiry under Rule 9 of the board of inquiry rules and report to the authority who convened the board. If this were to happen and the convening authority were


satisfied that there was any substance in the president's fears, he could under Rule 6 (ii, d) revoke the order convening the board and convene a fresh board suitably constituted.
My final point, which from the common sense point of view is the point in which there seems to me to be most substance, is that since a board of inquiry can be convened only by either the Army Council or by a military officer they can be relied on to use their discretion in deciding how a board shall be constituted so as to ensure that justice will be done to any individual concerned. I was satisfied during the Select Committee proceedings, and I find no reason to change my mind, that in practice this will work without injustice to anyone concerned.
However, I recognise that this is a change of substance. I recognise the strength of the feelings of the hon. Member for Dudley. Therefore, I am prepared to give him an undertaking that we will endeavour to issue administrative instructions to the effect that a board of inquiry should, if practicable, be composed of Service personnel, or at least a majority of Service personnel, particularly where it seems likely that its report or opinions on questions of fact may lead to disciplinary or financial consequences for officers or other ranks. We will certainly try to do something along those lines. I hope that that will be satisfactory to the Committee and will at any rate go some way to meet the points made by the hon. Member for Dudley.

Mr. Mulley: I take it that the assurance given by the Under-Secretary to my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) will also cover the Under-Secretary of State for Air. The two Services are equally affected by this point, so the undertaking for the Army will apply also to the Air Force. Will it be possible at a subsequent stage to consider whether something to meet my hon. Friend's point can be written into the Bill? While we have every reason to accept that the administrative arrangements will be as the Under-Secretary said, it is nonsense for there to be a Select Committee of the House of Commons, and so on, if the real substance is to be done afterwards in regulations in which the House of Commons can play no part.

Mr. Ramsden: On the first point, I think that I can give that assurance on behalf of my hon. Friend the Under. Secretary of State for Air. As to the second point, my undertaking was really on the lines of a recommendation to be laid down by some form of administrative instruction. I do not think that we could write this principle into the Bill. Had that been possible in any satisfactory way, I think that the Select Committee of which the hon. Member for Sheffield, Park (Mr. Mulley) and I were members, would have devised it, but I hope that in this case he will agree that an administrative instruction is the appropriate means of dealing with this point of difficulty.
Although, formally, it is possible to answer the arguments and doubts expressed by hon. Members, there is need, perhaps, in future practice to emphasise the point that is at the back of their minds, and to make sure that attention is drawn to it in the course of administration. I feel that such an instruction would go a long way to meet the point, and make sure that future practice conformed with the spirit of what I think the whole Committee wishes to see.

Mr. Wigg: I am very much obliged to the hon. Gentleman for his undertaking, which meets my point of view. In changing circumstances, this is a difficult matter. The civilianisation of the Army, as it were, forces some such conclusion upon the War Office, and I quite agree with the hon. Gentleman that our rule is common sense. If he will be good enough to give the instructions, the desired result depends on the common sense with which they are carried out.
8.15 p.m.
There is one question of fact, however. By what may have been a slip of the tongue, the Under-Secretary said that a civilian could not be a president of a board of inquiry, but paragraph I of Appendix 3 of the Special Report states:
Clause 25 is drafted in broad terms to enable a civilian in the service of the Crown to be a member of a Board of Inquiry and to be a President or member of a Regimental or Unit inquiry.
A civilian can, therefore, be president. I do not make a great point of this, but as the hon. Gentleman's words will be on the record I thought we should get it right.

Mr. Mulley: My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has brought forward a very important point. As I understand it, a civilian cannot be president of a board of inquiry. Subsection (2) makes it clear that
A board of inquiry shall consist of a president, who shall he an officer not below the rank of captain or corresponding rank and be subject to military law …
On the other hand, a civilian can, of course, be the sole member, if necessary, of a one-man regimental inquiry.

Mr. Wigg: A civilian can be a member of a board of inquiry, and as he can be a president or member of a regimental inquiry, he can be president of a regimental inquiry.

Mr. Ramsden: I intended to refer to boards of inquiry, of which there must be a military president. If I accidentally brought in regimental or unit inquiries, and said that civilians could not be presidents of those, I was wrong.

Amendment negatived.

Mr. Mulley: I beg to move, in page 21, line 25, to leave out "subsection" and to insert "subsections".

The Temporary Chairman (Dr. Horace King): I think that it would be for the convenience of the Committee if, with this Amendment, we took those in page 21, line 25, leave Gut "section" and insert "sections"; in line 26, after "1955", to insert:
and of the Air Force Act, 1955
and in page 21, to leave out lines 28 to 44 and to insert:
(2) A board of inquiry shall consist of a president and not less than two other members who shall be persons in the service of the Crown.

Mr. Mulley: Yes, Dr. King.
These are purely drafting Amendments. It seemed to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget), and I agree with him, that they put the necessary requirements in rather simpler language than does the original. I commend them to the Committee

Mr. Ramsden: I realised that the Amendment that suggests using the phrase
… persons in the service of the Crown

was another attempt, presumably devised by the hon. and learned Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget), to shorten the Bill, and that it was designed to attract by its brevity. This phrase is much shorter than the longer and clumsier one we have included in the Bill, but I must advise the Committee that it would have two effects that hon. Members may not have foreseen, and which would prejudice the Bill's intention.
In the first place, we should get a position where the president of a board of inquiry could be a civilian. I cannot think that this would be the intention of the Committee, especially in view of the remarks made in the debate that we have just finished. It is not intended, and I do not think that it has ever been contemplated, that a civilian should act as president of a board of inquiry. For civilians to do so would be to alter the Service character of these boards, and that character is desirable because boards of inquiry will always be concerned with Service matters.
There is the further objection that the suggested phrase does not cover all persons subject to military law. For example, I am advised that under Section 260 of the Army and Air Force Act, Commonwealth officers attached to our forces, whose countries are republics, are subject to military law though they are not in the service of the Crown.
I think that the Committee will agree that there is no real reason for their being made ineligible to sit on boards of inquiry. In fact, on occasion it might be very desirable for a Commonwealth officer to be a member of a board of inquiry where, for instance, the inquiry was into the absence of a soldier or airman from the Commonwealth who was attached to our forces.
Therefore, in spite of the superficial attraction of the more elegant form of words, I must advise the Committee that our own more cumbersome effort is necessary to achieve what we have in mind. I hope that the Committee will, even if regretfully, accept this advice.
Turning now to those Amendments that suggest the form of words "British subject"—

The Temporary Chairman: Order. We are not taking those.

Mr. Ramsden: In that case, Dr. King, I have concluded my reply, and I hope that hon. Gentlemen will be convinced by it.

Mr. Mulley: I am sure that had my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) been present, he would have been convinced as I am, by the argument of the Under-Secretary. I therefore beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Mr. Willis: I beg to move, in page 21, line 32, to leave out "person" and to insert "British subject".

The Temporary Chairman: It would, I think, be obvious common sense to take with this Amendment that in page 21, line 43, leave out "person" and insert "British subject"; that in page 22, line 4, after "persons", insert "being British subjects", and that in line 15, after "persons", insert "being British subjects".

Mr. Willis: Yes, Dr. King, that is obviously quite convenient. As the object of the Amendment is quite clear, I do not need to say much about it. Its object is to ensure that the other persons referred to shall be British subjects. I assume from the Under-Secretary's earlier remarks that it is not the Government's intention to accept this Amendment, but we will be glad to hear the reasons why, because it seems to us to be a sensible, reasonable and assuring Amendment.

Mr. Mulley: We need not take long over the Amendment, but it raises a point of some substance which, the Under-Secretary will recall, was discussed by the Select Committee and also was the subject of an additional document prepared by his Department—Appendix III to the Select Committee's Report.
As I understand the position, it is already the case that persons subject to military law, although they may be aliens, are entitled to be members of a board of inquiry or a regimental inquiry and, in that sense, it seems unreasonable to make a distinction between aliens and British citizens both in the service of the Crown. Considerable attention was given to this matter, because it is the practice in overseas stations for a number of

foreign nationals to he recruited into the service of the Crown in a civilian capacity. Doubt was expressed as to whether or not it would be appropriate for them to be called on to be members of a board of inquiry or, even worse, to conduct a regimental inquiry which might have some disciplinary effect on individual British soldiers.
The same point is at stake as in our previous discussion about the element of civilian membership on boards of inquiry. As I understand the reply of the Under-Secretary, the whole object was to deal with rather unusual circumstances and to use civilians where their use was particularly appropriate, but it was not contemplated that this would be a regular practice. I imagine that the Committee would not be too alarmed if the Bill took power to include alien civilians on boards of inquiry, or to use them on regimental inquiries, only in special circumstances. But if it is contemplated that this will become a regular practice, then it ties in with the previous discussion and we should be failing in our duty if we did not require an explanation from the Government as to why the Government are now seeking these additional powers.

Mr. Ramsden: I must disappoint the hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Willis) because, when he interrupted me before, I was not at the point of saying that I could accept the Amendment but I was beginning an argument to try to convince the Committee why we should allow the Bill to remain as it stands.

Mr. Willis: The hon. Gentleman may not have heard what I said. I am not so much disappointed that he has not found it possible to accept this series of Amendments, for I said that I did not expect him to accept them in view of the final words of his previous speech.

Mr. Ramsden: In that case, I am glad that the hon. Gentleman will not be disappointed. I believe that these Amendments reflect a certain disquiet which was evident during our proceedings on the Select Committee, when the possibility of people who were not British subjects being members of boards of inquiry arose. My impression, after the Committee had reported, was that, having looked at this question in


detail, we were satisfied that what we are proposing reinforces the arguments used before and should satisfy the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East. Incidentally, I believe that as drafted the Amendments do not quite achieve what hon. Gentlemen opposite want, since we should still be left with officers who are not British subjects in the position of being able to convene boards of inquiry and regimental or unit inquiries.

Mr. Mulley: That is so at present. That is the case at present with aliens subject to military law under the original 1955 Act, as I understand it.

Mr. Ramsden: That is the case at the moment and it would still be the case if the Government were to accept the Amendments as drafted. I am merely drawing attention to this to try to show that the Amendments are technically defective as they stand. No doubt, if the Government accepted them in principle, they could be put right. However, I am afraid that we cannot accept, or are so far unconvinced that it is right to accept, even the principle involved.
Hon. Gentlemen opposite will realise that, for example, Gurkhas serving with the British Army—and this point has been mentioned this afternoon—are technically aliens and it does not sound sensible to exclude them from boards of inquiry which may well be concerned with the affairs of their own units. Secondly there may be—as I have mentioned in another connection—occasions when alien civilians may be employed on boards of inquiry with positive advantage. One can think of cases where experts on some relevant subject might benefit and give valuable help to boards of inquiry, such as in the case of getting over difficulties of language.
There is a third consideration; alien officers may be employed in large numbers in war time—as, indeed, they were during the last war—and it might cause difficulty if they were to be excluded from boards of inquiry which might be concerned with incidents affecting their own nationals. I hope that, on reflection—and bearing in mind the discretion which lies with the convening authority on which a certain amount of reliance must, and can, be rightly placed—the

Committee will feel that there are practical reasons why the Clause should be allowed to stand as at present and that, after this explanation, the hon. Gentleman will withdraw the Amendment.

Mr. Mulley: I do not want to make a lot of this point, but I think that the Under-Secretary must not be allowed to answer the Amendments of my hon. Friend by reading into them words which are not there. They are not, as he conceded, meant to deal with aliens who are actually subject to military law, and there is considerable distinction between them. This was recognised in 1955 because, I understand, without any amendment to the present law, a person who is an alien subject to military law can be a member of a board of inquiry and there is no need for an Amendment to deal with that.
There is a difference, however, with regard to an alien who has the Queen's Commission and who is a member of the Armed Forces. If an alien has a commission in the Services he is obviously considered to be a suitable person to administer discipline. It was, therefore, irrelevant for the Under-Secretary to have brought in the position of Gurkhas, for this subject is very much tied up with the use of civilians. It is, I imagine, much more likely that foreign nationals will be employed in the service of the Crown in a civilian capacity than they will be subject to military law. We are not talking about aliens who may be in the Armed Forces, but civilian aliens. We therefore wanted a much better explanation for the reasons for this proviso.
Finally, I am a little alarmed by the Under-Secretary's repetition of the argument that it may be necessary to have someone on the board who can assist with the language. That seems to me to be a very odd way of conducting an inquiry, to have a board of inquiry consisting of three persons, where evidence will be taken in a foreign language and where only one member of the board will be able to follow the language. If there is a board of inquiry at which witnesses give evidence in a language which is not understood by all the members of the board, surely it should not be left to a member of the board to act as interpreter. It has been said that it might be desirable to have alien civilians on the board because of their knowledge


of the language, but surely one would not want them to be on a board of this sort merely to act as interpreters.

8.30 p.m.

Mr. Willis: My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Park (Mr. Mulley) has said some of the things that I wanted to say. The Under-Secretary did not convince me of his case. He said that the Amendments might be technically defective, but that is never a good argument to apply against an Amendment. We are considering the principle of the matter, and not the wording. Provided the Government accept the principle, they can always incorporate the Amendment on Report.
Then the Under-Secretary referred to the Gurkhas. As my hon. Friend pointed out, we are surely dealing with officers who are already subject to military law.

Mr. Ramsden: I am advised that as it stands, the Amendment covers military aliens—aliens who are subject to military discipline. That is why, in replying to the hon. Gentleman. I felt obliged to introduce the point about the Gurkhas.

Mr. Willis: If that is the case, it eliminates two of the reasons that the hon. Gentleman gave for not accepting the Amendment. The first dealt with the Gurkhas and the second dealt with the fact that during a war we might have working with us a number of aliens, most of whom I should have thought would have been subject to military law, and as such could already be included in such boards of inquiry by the present wording.
That left only one reason, which was a very poor reason, namely, that these people might be helpful as interpreters. In the memorandum submitted on behalf of the Secretary of State for War to the Select Committee we are told that there may be occasions when the circumstances of an inquiry would be such as to make it undesirable for an alien to be associated with it. The undesirability on a number of occasions is recognised. If it is undesirable for aliens to sit on a board of inquiry, I should have thought that we ought to have taken cognisance of that fact and put it in the Bill. But on the question of language, surely the point is that one

should engage an interpreter. As my hon. Friend says, if only one person on the board knows the language we should think in terms of an inquiry being conducted with the aid of an interpreter, and if that is so, the interpreter should be present as an interpreter and not as a member of the board.
Therefore, I can find very little substance in any of the reasons that the hon. Gentleman gave for resisting this Amendment. We have already discussed the Gurkhas and the fact that they are already subject to military law. That eliminates two of the reasons.
The third reason seemed pretty poor. I should have thought it would have been a good thing to have incorporated this Amendment, or an Amendment with a similar purpose, in the Bill. Certainly anybody whose conduct was being inquired into would like this Amendment to be incorporated. It would give a certain assurance and would make the innovation which is introduced in this Clause much more acceptable.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: One reason for the Government not accepting the Amendment, so it was said, was that the Gurkhas should be included. Is it not covered by the words
who is in the service of the Crown"?
If the Gurkhas are here, they will be in the service of the Crown.

Amendment negatived.

Clause ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 27 to 36 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 37.—(AMENDMENTS CONSEQUENTIAL ON CREATION OF RANK OF LANCE CORPORAL AND LANCE-BOMBARDIER.)

Mr. Profumo: I beg to move, in page 26, line 4, at the end to insert:
(b) in subsection (6) of section seventy-eight, for the words "the three last foregoing subsections" there shall be substituted the words "the four last foregoing subsections";.
This is a drafting Amendment. Subsections (3) to (5) of Section 78 of the Army Act, 1955, set out punishments which a commanding officer may award in summary proceedings and lay down that, if he intends to award certain punishments, the accused must be given the opportunity to elect trial by court-martial. Subsection (6) provides that, if


the commanding officer has referred a charge to higher authority with a view to trial by court-martial and higher authority refers it back to be dealt with summarily, he should deal with the accused in the way set out in subsections (3) to (5).
Clause 37 inserts a new subsection (3A) to enable the commanding Officer to reduce a lance-corporal in rank summarily. It is necessary, therefore, to amend the reference in subsection (6) to
the three last foregoing subsections
to read:
the four last foregoing subsections

Amendment agreed to.

Clause, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 38 and 39 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

New Clause.—(MAXIMUM SENTENCE OF DETENTION.)

In section seventy-two of the Army Act, 1955, and section seventy-two of the Air Force Act, 1955, for the words "two years" there shall be substituted the words "three months".—[Mr. Emrys Hughes.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
I hold that three months' detention is a sufficiently severe sentence for any man. I see that the Secretary of State for War has recently been spending some time in a camp. He seems to have had a very pleasant time, and to have come away with very agreeable impressions. I do not know whether he has ever spent any time in a detention camp, or whether he has ever gone there in the same circumstances as I did, but I suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that it would be quite a good thing for him to see the inside of a detention camp or a military prison from the soldiers' point of view. I can assure him that if he goes there disguised as a private soldier, and stays there for a few days, he will realise that military detention is one of the severest sentences that can be imposed upon a soldier.
The idea that detention is not imprisonment is one which gives us a sense of illusion. I was unfortunate, in my Army career, to be sentenced to two years' detention. I was taken to what was then

called the "glasshouse". I do not know whether it has been re-christened now, but I rather fancy that the "glasshouse" is still an institution To the severity of civilian imprisonment there is added the harshness of military discipline and I can imagine no worse sentence for any man than that of two years in what is called the "glasshouse". I do not know how much these "glasshouses" have been reformed in recent years, but, certainly, they combined brutality with severity and harshness in a very bad way indeed. I would not like to see anyone sentenced to more than three months in a detention camp.
Therefore, my new Clause would make the maximum sentence not two years, but three months. If a soldier is sentenced to a long term of military detention, I submit that, after that, he is not very much use to the Army. He is not the sort of man whom the Secretary of State for War wants to retain in the Army. As far as I can gather from the right hon. Gentleman's very enlightened speech on a previous Amendment, he does not want to have reluctant soldiers in the Army, but the unfortunate soldier sentenced to detention goes to the military prison and, at the end of his sentence, is brought back again.
I cannot conceive of anyone who has spent any amount of time in a detention barracks being enthusiastic about the Army after he has served that sentence. I suggest that the maximum sentence should be three months, and that that kind of soldier should be discharged from the Army and not kept there, if we want soldiers who really believe in the Army and in serving on the lines which the right hon. Gentleman outlined in his previous speech.
8.45 p.m.
There are various views of people who are sentenced to military imprisonment. There are various degrees of punishment for the infringement of military discipline. One day last week during the early morning I heard an account on the wireless of the discipline which prevailed at the time of the Napoleonic wars and of the Battle of Waterloo. We heard that General Picton and another general imposed discipline by flogging, and very severe flogging. Soldiers were flogged until they died. I do not suggest that this sort of punishment exists today, but


I have a shrewd idea that there is brutality in the military prison. I know that there was in my time.
I believe that it is possible to run a military prison without extreme brutality. I remember the very pleasant reception which I had the first time that I was taken, with others, to the "glasshouse" in Devizes. They said, "They tame lions here". We were the kind of people who could not be tamed by military discipline, but there were other soldiers in the Devizes military gaol at that time, Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders, who believed that that detention camp was a hell on earth; and so it was.
I therefore suggest that three months is a sufficient time to sentence anyone to military detention. If the Secretary of State, or the Under-Secretary of State, wish to make investigations, let them go disguised as soldiers, so that no one will know who they really are, to one of these "glasshouses", to see what happens there.

Mr. Willis: My hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) has raised an interesting subject. The conditions which prevail in military detention centres are never discussed in this Committee. From my Service experience, conditions in detention centres are awful.
Has there been any change in the treatment of military offenders during the past few years? We should be told something about the attitude of mind of the War Office in dealing with men sentenced to detention, particularly those sentenced to long periods of detention. In civilian life a great deal of consideration is given to what is the correct treatment of offenders and what should be done with them. Very considerable changes have been made both in their treatment and in the conditions in which they serve their sentences.
There are possibly very good reasons for considering the question of Service prisons. It seems to me that the old type of detention should be a thing of the past. Years ago we were countenancing a form of deterrent which I do not think many people would accept today. We were countenancing a very severe form of deterrent because we were training a type of man who, by and large, did what he was told. In other words, he

was a bit of an automatom. The discipline of the Army depended to a great extent on reducing people to a state in which they made automatic responses to certain commands. That might have been necessary; I am not arguing the merits or demerits today. Punishment during detention was often along those lines, with the aim of trying to make a man like that.
I suggest that the Army of today, or, for that matter, any Service, is quite different. We are not wanting that type of man so much as a man with rather different characteristics, who has not only courage, but initiative, and who is willing to take risks and all sorts of other things. When we bear all that in mind, it seems to me that we must look at the methods of punishment and consider whether the system of punishment which we are authorising is calculated to achieve the results we want today.
I therefore suggest to the Under-Secretary that the results we want are different from those which we set out to achieve twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. If the results we want are different, the methods of obtaining them probably must be different. If that is so, it is time we were told something about this. I have taken a great interest in Service matters in the House of Commons for the past fifteen years and this is one of the aspects about which I have heard little for any Service. Therefore, we should he told what changes are being made and in what directions they are tending. What are the aims of the Army now in inflicting this type of punishment?

Mr. Mayhew: I agree very much with my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Willis) that this is a subject about which we hear little. I have warned the Minister that in connection with this new Clause and the next, I should be asking a number of questions which it would be of great interest to have answered. One does not have to agree with the suggestions put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) to be profoundly interested in the subject. I therefore ask the Minister not only to reply to the questions which my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East has just put to him about what changes have taken place in the Army detention


centres, but to reply to one or two questions of my own.
I should like to ask the Minister more specifically what is the average length of sentence, what sentences are served and how many soldiers are at present in detention. What proportion does this number of people in detention bear to the strength of the Army? How has this percentage gone up or down in recent years?

The Temporary Chairman: Order. It is difficult for the Chair to hear the hon. Gentleman who is addressing the Committee if other hon. Members are talking too loudly.

Sir O. Prior-Palmer: I apologise, Dr. King.

Mr. Mayhew: The figures for which I have asked are easily available for civilian prisons. We should like to know what evidence the Minister has of the effectiveness of detention as measured, for instance, by the subsequent careers of the soldiers who have been in detention centres. How many of them go through their subsequent military career without further offences for which detention is given or without offences for which they are discharged? These are sometimes useful and significant statistics to have.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire used the word "brutality" although I missed any evidence later than his own experience in an Army prison to justify that accusation of brutality. Nevertheless, I should like to know from the Minister what are the inspection arrangements at the detention centres, who carries out the inspections, how often are they carried out and what reports are made. It would be of interest to the Committee to have answers to these questions.

Mr. Ramsden: The hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) has raised an important matter on which, in my recollection, there has been little discussion in recent years, and the Committee should be grateful to him for giving us the opportunity to review the question of detention in the Army. I understand that he intends to move the next new Clause—(Option to serve sentence of detention in a civil prison)—and, as that also deals with the subject, the most helpful thing that I can do now

is to address myself to the narrow point which arises from the Clause which he has moved and then, when he moves the other Clause, to try to cover some of the points which have been made by Members opposite, particularly by the hon. Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew). By that time, some of the answers to the questions which he asked may become available. I have not all the answers by me just now.
The hon. Member for South Ayrshire's main point was whether the maximum sentence of detention should be three months instead of two years. The Committee should consider the implications of what such a change would mean for soldiers who incur this punishment. I have considered what the situation might be. I do not believe that the change would be altogether to the advantage of the soldiers concerned.
The award of detention for periods up to two years—and detention may be awarded for almost any period, from one day to two years—covers a very wide range of offences for which, in the light of practical experience, it has been found by the Army to be the most appropriate sentence. If we made three months the limit, there would at once be numerous offences, now dealt with by detention centres, for which detention could no longer be given, and we should have to look for an alternative penalty higher up the scale of punishments.
In many instances, the most appropriate punishment would be imprisonment. If we accepted the Clause, there is no doubt that, without a sufficient range of punishments at our disposal, we should have to give more men sentences of imprisonment. There are a number of reasons why we do not want to do this, and I do not think that the Committee, on reflection, would want to do it either. All these reasons are fundamentally in the interests of the men concerned.
The debate on the next Clause will give me an opportunity to enlarge on the whole system of detention and its administration, but there can be no doubt that, if one were obliged to commit to prison some of the men who now undergo sentences of detention, they would be at a disadvantage, in that imprisonment usually leads to dishonourable discharge from the Army. It certainly leaves a man with a stigma of a


kind that detention does not leave, and it might well bring him into contact with hardened criminals, associations with whom might well have an unfortunate effect on his character.
Again—although I will say more about this later—there is the rehabilitative aspect to detention which confinement in prison cannot match, and is not intended to match, from the point of view of the Army. I hope, therefore, that the hon. Member will not press this new Clause, because, as I have tried to explain, it would not be in the best interests of the soldiers.

Question put and negatived.

New Clause.—(OPTION TO SERVE SENTENCE OF DETENTION IN A CIVIL PRISON.)

Where any soldier or airman is sentenced to detention under the Army Act, 1955, or the Air Force Act, 1955, he may elect to serve his sentence in a civil prison.—[Mr. Emrys Hughes.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

9.0 p.m.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I beg to move, That the Clause be read Second time.
The remarks which the Minister has already made seem to be a justification for this Clause. While, in these days, considerable light has been thrown on conditions in civil prisons, not so much light has been thrown on military prisons. As one who has had experience of both kinds of prison, from the inside, I hope that conditions have changed since I was in the "glasshouse" on Salisbury Plain. If they have not changed, it is time that those prisons were shut.
I do not know whether the Minister would go so far as to welcome an inspection of military detention centres by hon. Members. I followed with great interest the investigation of civil prisons by my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew), especially some of the interviews which he had with prisoners, notably those at Dartmoor. I afterwards followed him on visits of my own. As a result of investigations of that kind, even with a television camera—a complete innovation—public interest was focussed on life in prisons. My hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East did a great public service.

Mr. Mayhew: I appreciate very much what my hon. Friend is saying, but noth-

ing of those programmes was conveyed to him if he now introduces a Clause to say that soldiers should go to our overcrowded local prisons.

Mr. Hughes: I suggest that my hon. Friend knows a good deal as a result of his experience of civil prisons, but that I have a shrewd suspicion that he does not know much about military prisons. To clear their good name, the Army authorities should allow my hon. Friend, with his television camera, to examine conditions in military prisons and to talk to some of the soldiers there. If that were done, there would be some interesting revelations which would prove what I am saying up to the hilt.
The punishment of a soldier is very severe, and detention, even in an ordinary barracks, can be very severe. I remember that when I was a soldier in the guardroom, soldiers who had absconded, or who were late returning from leave, were sentenced to a few days' imprisonment and were treated very brutally. I do not know whether that still goes on, but I knew of a regimental guardroom where the sergeant-major was a heavyweight boxer. Prisoners who escaped from that guardroom and who were subsequently returned to it were taken back to the guardroom, handcuffed and knocked unconscious.
I do not know whether that goes on today. I would be glad to know that the Army has become more human, but I have a suspicion that there is a seamy side to Army life. If I am wrong I would welcome the opportunity of being proved wrong, but I have an uneasy feeling about this aspect of Army life. We have devoted a good deal of time to reforming civil prisons, and the routine in them is nothing like as bad as it was a generation ago, but military prisons have not been so considered, and a public investigation would be all to the good. If the Minister is unable to accept my suggestion, I hope that he will accept my advice that he should personally investigate the position in military prisons and not be satisfied with a superficial examination of what goes on in them.
What inspection is there of military prisons? A civil prisoner can appeal to the visiting magistrates. Inspections of military prisons are carried out by officers from the War Office; officers whose natural instincts lead them to


support discipline; officers whose natural inclinations lead them to support the officer in charge of the military prison against the person who is in it. As I say, a civil prisoner can appeal to the visiting magistrates, but a soldier has no opportunity of appeal. Even though a soldier may have committed an offence against military law, surely he is entitled to consideration as a human being. I have a suspicion that that is not what happens at the moment.
The new Clause would give a prisoner the opportunity to serve his sentence in a civil prison instead of in a military one. What kind of rehabilitation goes on in military prisons? How does one rehabilitate a soldier who has been sentenced to six months' detention and who hates the very name of the Army? How does one rehabilitate that kind of soldier? I cannot believe that he is the kind of person whom the Secretary of State for War wants in the modern Army.
Certain sentences are, of course, necessary if discipline is to be maintained. If a soldier gets drunk, or commits certain offences, and is sentenced to a period of, say, six months' imprisonment, he should have the option of serving that sentence in a civil prison. The Minister says that that would be a disgrace. I do not know whether it is a disgrace to be discharged from the Army for bad conduct. I know that I was, but other soldiers might regard it in a different light. If a soldier says, "I prefer to serve my time in a civil prison; I prefer to serve my time associating with people who have broken the civil law", I do not see why he should not have the option of doing so.
I know that these ideas are strange and novel to people who think in terms of military law and discipline, but they should be seriously considered by hon. Members. The kind of Army to which the Minister referred must consist not of reluctant heroes, but of men who have the will to serve. Men of that type will not be found among those who have been sentenced to military detention and have a grievance against the old routine.
I suggest that this is a sensible new Clause. It has probably never been moved before, and I do not think that

it will get the slightest sympathy from people who are used to administer discipline for the War Office, but I am glad that I have moved it, even if it has resulted only in light being thrown on a subject about which more should be known by the House and the people of this country.

Mr. Wigg: As I understand, the control of detention barracks and military prisons is vested in the Army Council, and they are under the command of the general officers in command of the areas in which they are situated. I do not believe that all these men are sadists, crooks, vampires and brutes. Most of those whom I have met seem to be kindly men. If my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) dressed himself in uniform he could almost be taken for one of them. I do not believe for a second that they would commit the kind of brutalities which my hon. Friend fought against years ago.
I can well imagine that when my hon. Friend was a young man he was very sure of himself and of the world about him, and that when he joined the Welsh Fusiliers and was sent to detention for refusing to obey an order he was a little awkward. If, at the same time, he had come my way, and I had been a lance-corporal I am sure that for the rest of his days he would have described me as a brute. Knowing him, I am sure that after a day or two we would have got very "fed up" with each other, and as it would not have been me who asked the hon. Member to come inside, he might well have regarded the results of his meeting me as brutality.
I repudiate my hon. Friend's allegations—

Mr. Emrys Hughes: My hon. Friend has never been in a military prison.

Mr. Wigg: No. I had the good fortune never to be caught. My hon. Friend has retained his sense of humour, but he does not always retain his sense of proportion. He says that he does not wish to denigrate the Army, but he says things about it which are horrible—horrible because they are said responsibly—but which relate to an experience which is no doubt fresh in his mind even after forty years. They are not true today. The fact that the Army controls these institutions and that


the G.O.C. is responsible for them means that they are visited and inspected.
The other thing that my hon. Friend should remember is that when a man is given detention he remains a soldier. He goes there because he is still a soldier, and when his sentence is finished he will soldier on. That is one reason why he should continue to go to detention barracks rather than to a civil prison. If he is subjected to brutality, the ordinary procedures of complaint are open to him. He can complain to the visiting officer when he is in, and he can write to my hon. Friend when he is out.
I probably have as much correspondence as any other Member on military matters, but I have no complaints of this kind. I have friends who, have, unfortunately, been caught, like my hon. Friend, but I have never had this kind of complaint from them. I do not believe that my hon. Friend's allegations are true, and the suggestion contained in his proposed new Clause is a thoroughly reactionary one. I take great exception to it.
The fact that a man is sent to detention barracks means that the Army still wants him, and sees some good in him. It means that the Army is taking the trouble to try to make him a good soldier. Above all, it tries to keep from him the stain of becoming a convict and so coming into contact, often during his most impressionable years, with people who will lead him into ways from which the hopes of reform are not very good. For those reasons I hope that detention barracks will continue to operate. If facilities are granted I would welcome the opportunity to visit these institutions with my hon. Friend. I am sure that we should not find the kind of things he suggested if we did so.
I now turn to something said earlier tonight which rather amused me. Hon. Members may take what I am about to say as a sign of my getting old. When we were discussing the Army code of discipline it was suggested that the young men of today want a different sort of discipline, and that those who joined the Army as volunteers and Regulars forty years ago, and liked it, were suffering from a softening of the brain, if they had any brain. I repudiate that. When I look round and think of the friends who served with me, and I hear it sug-

gested that, as it were, they were a group of soft-brained scallywags, I must say that that is just not true. The quality of the old Regular Army was very good and I hope that it is so at the present day. It certainly does not fit in with the picture given by my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire.

Mr. Ramsden: I am glad that the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) has answered his hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) on some of the hon. Member's more extravagant speculations about conditions in military prisons. I could not possibly have accepted what he said. It would have been an unjustified reflection on the devoted service of the military prison staff corps and indeed on the administration of the Army Council and my right hon. Friend had there been any verisimilitude in the kind of conditions he purported to describe. I am glad that the hon. Member for Dudley, from his own side, replied to him in objective terms.
9.15 p.m.
It might help the Committee to be clearer about the general position as regards military prisons if I tried to explain the situation today and how it relates to what the hon. Member for South Ayrshire wants, that is the option for soldiers to choose a civilian rather than a military prison. Men who are sentenced to short periods of detention up to fourteen days spend their time in unit detention rooms. It is normal for men sentenced to periods between 14 and 28 days also to serve their sentences with their units. While in the unit detention rooms they continue their military training and are directed to such fatigue work as is suitable for the station that they are in.
Men sentenced to longer periods of detention, who are to return to normal duties with their units after release from detention, serve their sentences in military corrective training centres. That is quite a different thing from what the hon. Member for South Ayrshire referred to earlier as a "glasshouse". They are specifically designed to provide corrective treatment combined with military training. Their object is to return the men who come to them to their units as better soldiers. The emphasis is on education, physical training and other forms of training appropriate to a


soldier. It would be clearly impracticable to try to give the men such training in a civil prison. That is the first reason why the hon. Gentleman's Amendment is no good.
I must emphasise the corrective and rehabilitation aspect of the training provided in military corrective training centres. There are men who are not likely to respond to treatment in such a centre or whom it is intended should be discharged during their sentence or on completion of it. They are sent to military detention barracks and given physical training and other training of a rehabilitary nature, but this is directed not towards making them into better soldiers, because it has been decided that they are probably not fitted to be soldiers, but towards fitting them for civilian life. Their education is improved and they are taught a trade.
The hon. Member may say that these men should be in civil prisons, but this would be worse for them, first because they would come out with a stigma which does not attach to them from having been in a military detention barracks and, secondly, because the type of men with whom they are likely to have to associate in a civil prison will be different from those with whom they are likely to be associated in a military prison. There are people who cannot put up with the Army and who are perhaps driven by this inability to adjust themselves to a life of Army crime, but they are often quite different from the type of man found in a criminal prison.
In the old Army Act of 1881 there was some doubt about the length of time a soldier sentenced to detention should be required to serve in a civil prison under certain conditions. The Committee of 1952–54 bearing in mind the stigma attached to being in prison, formed the view that there should be no doubt at all on this point, and Section 124 of the Army Act, 1955, lays it down that detention may not be served in a military or civil prison, and for the reasons given that is sensible.
What the hon. Member proposes from the point of view of Army penal practice would be putting the clock back ever a hundred years. In 1836 a commission of investigation was appointed which recommended that separate places

of confinement should be provided for soldiers. The reasons given for this recommendation were that
a soldier, though under punishment"—
I am quoting from the Committee; it is rather good—
should not lose sight of the profession against the rules of which he has offended, nor should he be placed where he is in contact with men whose notions of crime are not very strict and who have none whatever of the nature of a military offence
From 1844, when changes consequent upon that Report were made, right up to 1941 there is a steady history of development in the penal philosophy and the penal practice of the Army. I think that if the hon. Member studies it in detail he will admit that it is a not-discreditable story. I will not rehearse all these changes before the Committee tonight, because it would take some time, but before I try to answer some of the specific questions put by the hon. Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew) I should mention one development which is planned to take place in the near future. The military prison and detention barracks at Shepton Mallett—

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I know it.

Mr. Ramsden: —at present houses soldiers under sentence of imprisonment by courts martial and soldiers under detention—

Mr. Hughes: Is this the old prison at Shepton Mallett or is it a new prison?

Mr. Ramsden: As far as I am aware it is the only prison at Shepton Mallett. I have not seen it. I am sure that it has evolved since the hon. Member's day, in conformity with the principles of evolution in our penal practice which I have described. Those who are there are under sentence of imprisonment or soldiers under detention for whom rehabilitation as soldiers is not considered a possibility.
Shepton Mallett is due to be closed—the hon. Member will be interested to hear—in 1963. It will be handed back to the Prison Commission, and thereafter the Prison Commission, which I believe I should technically call the Home Office since the passing of the Criminal Justice Act, has agreed to take all those who are subject to sentences of imprisonment.


For those under long sentences of detention a new wing will be built at Colchester alongside the military corrective training centre there. Shepton Mallett for Army purposes will come to an end probably in 1963.
I hope that, having heard my explanation, the hon. Member will agree that there is some justification for our view that detention is in many ways better for most soldiers under sentence than a term in a civilian prison. I hope that I have convinced the hon. Gentleman of the merits of the system which has grown up over the years.
The hon. Member for Woolwich, East asked me some specific questions. One was about the effectiveness of our system as shown by results. The best figure I can give him is that 76 per cent. of one year's intake into the Corrective Training Centre at Colchester, where most people subject to all but the longest sentences of detention go, were first offenders, 21 per cent. were second offenders, and 3 per cent. were offenders for the third time. That indicates quite a successful rate of non-return, though it is not as precise a statistic as I would have wished to give. If 76 per cent. of all those who go in a year to the main corrective training centre in the United Kingdom are first offenders, it must be evidence that we are successful in seeing that the rate of recidivism is not unduly high.
Hon. Members asked about the numbers in detention and the average length of the sentence. The average length of sentence is three and a half months. There are at present 400 in detention at Colchester. This does not include those at Shepton Mallet. This represents 0·16 per cent. of Army strength. I have not available the comparison with earlier years. I will try to find it and write to the hon. Member about that and any other specific question raised by him which I have not covered.
Hon. Members will probably agree that this has been a useful little debate. I hope that for the reasons I have given, the hon. Member for South Ayrshire will not press the Clause. I hope that, having heard my explanation, he will be good enough to withdraw it.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: I have certainly broken new ground by moving the Clause.

I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) and other hon. Gentlemen who have spoken were quite honest in expressing their point of view, but it is not the point of view of the man who has been inside. The attitude of my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley is understandable: he knows an enormous amount about the Army. He does not know the inside of a "glasshouse". He knows only the point of view of the man who has sent somebody there. That is true of Ministers reading out their briefs. They are doing their duty in their own way. I should welcome any investigation. I know that I shall not get any support for the Clause, but I hope that as a result of what the Under-Secretary has called a useful little debate this will not be the last we shall hear of what I think is a rather important subject.

The Temporary Chairman: Does the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) wish to withdraw the Clause?

Mr. Emrys Hughes: No.

Question put and negatived.

New Clause,—(AMENDMENT OF S. 24 OF ARMY ACT, 1955, AND S. 24 OF AIR FORCE, ACT, 1955.)

In section twenty-four of the Army Act, 1955, and in section twenty-four of the Air Force Act, 1955 (which relate to aiding the enemy), for the words "international usage" there shall he substituted the words "any international convention or rule of law for the time being in force".—[Mr. Elwyn Jones.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

9.30 p.m.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
I endeavoured to raise the point to which this Clause relates when the 1955 Army Act was being considered in the House, and I think that, now resurrected, it has some substance and, admittedly, a good deal of difficulty, Section 24 of the Army Act, deals with offences relating to aiding the enemy, and specifies five types of such aid. The important thing to realise is that each type of such crime is capable of carrying the death penalty, and this would therefore seem to be a section of the criminal military law needing as much precision as the draftsman cam bring to bear on his task.
The matter with which the new Clause deals arises from the words of Section 24 (1) of the 1955 Act, which says:
Any person subject to military law who with intent to assist the enemy … (c) having been made a prisoner of war, serves with or aids the enemy in the prosecution of hostilities or of measures calculated to influence morale, or in any other manner whatsoever not authorised by international usage —
I submit that those last ten words and, in particular, the words "international usage" are so vague as to be almost meaningless. International usage is not law or international law, and a usage of war, as I understand the authorities on the matter, is in no way legally binding. The laws of war have been defined in the following terms:
The laws of war consist … partly of customary rules which have grown up in practice, and partly of written rules, that is to say, rules which have been expressly agreed upon by governments in international treaties and conventions.
That is the range of the laws of war, and it is to be noted that that definition does not include international usage.
What I find surprising is that this matter is now dealt with with some precision in Chapter 1 of the Manual of Military Law where, in paragraph 2, there is the following note:
Usages of war which exist side by side with the customary and the written law of war, are not legally binding. They can, for sufficient reasons, be disregarded by a belligerent. Usages of war have. however, a tendency to harden into legal rules of warfare; a large part of the modern law of war has grown up in that way.
That, of course, is true. Nevertheless, as the authors of Part III of the Manual said—and I think that they have taken the content of their conclusion from Oppenheim, usages of war are not legally binding. It seems, therefore, that to place a prisoner of war in peril of the death penalty for doing something that is not authorised by international usage is subjecting him to considerable danger.
When the words which are to be found in the Army Act were founded—presumably some time in 1955—the draftsman was then in the difficulty that the Government had not at that stage ratified the 1949 Geneva Prisoners of War Convention, which deals in great particularity with the rights and obligations of the prisoner of war. That Convention was made part of the law of this land by the

1957 Geneva Conventions Act. That Act has had the effect of making duties of the prisoner of war to be decided in the matter of the work that he can be compelled to do.
Article 50 of the 1949 Prisoner of War Convention deals with the matter explicitly, and states:
Besides work connected with camp administration, installation or maintenance, prisoners of war may be compelled to do only such work as is included in the fallowing classes:
Then there follow the classes of work: agriculture, certain industries connected with the production or extraction of raw materials, transport and handling of stores, commercial business, arts and crafts, domestic services and public utility services having no military character or purpose. Thus, that article sets out clearly the nature of the work that a prisoner of war may be compelled to do.
It would, therefore, seem to be important for the protection of the prisoner of war, so that he may know what are his rights of refusal and, on the other hand, what are his obligations, that the Army Act should be more precise than it is at present by more than this reference to the "international usage for the time being in force."
I do not claim any very great merit for the words I have suggested. Indeed, since thinking about the matter further, it may be that more specific and satisfactory words could be used. I am glad that the Attorney-General is here, because he will, no doubt, be able to give the Committee some guidance on the matter. I have thought that perhaps words other than those I have suggested in the Amendment might be better, words like "not required by any international convention or other rule of international law for the time being in force." Those words might be a better text than those contained in the Amendment.
I submit, in any event, that the existing words are unsatisfactory. They are dangerously vague in regard to a penal matter which can carry the death penalty. The problems and difficulties of the prisoner of war are likely to be heavy and it is, in all conscience, our duty to qualify this matter to the best of our ability.

Mr. Mulley: I hesitate to interpose myself between my distinguished hon.


and learned Friend the Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) and the Attorney-General, but I thought that it might be of some advantage to give the consumer's point of view. Having been a prisoner of war myself during the last war I certainly would have been alarmed if I had known that I was liable to so wide a provision as this.
In 1939, no doubt, the law was very different. I think it is typical that, here and there, there creeps into the Army and Air Force Acts the idea that having got fifteen different ways in which to catch an offender, nevertheless, it is thought that there may be some way in which he may slip out of the net, and, therefore, some additional words of an all-embracing character are included.
As we all know, there is a good deal of international discussion on the assumption that there is a war of ideologies, and that to use a phrase like "international usage" is to assume that all the people with whom we might be having hostilities subscribe to the same doctrines, whereas, I believe, a considerable number of countries have not become parties to any of the prisoner of war conventions.
It seems to me that the words in the Act, that a prisoner of war who
serves with or aids the enemy in the prosecution of hostilities or of measures calculated to influence morale …".
are all-embracing in themselves. Having been a prisoner of war, I cannot think of anything that anyone could have done that would not have been caught by the first part of subsection (1, c). Therefore, it seems to me that there is no need for these additional words.
If, however, it is thought that something further is required, I strongly support the attempt of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for West Ham, South to get it in a more precise form. Since the whole of the international law concerning the conduct, custody and treatment of prisoners of war is the subject of international convention, it would seem much more logical and fairer to use words of this sort. It may be that my hon. and learned Friend has not got the precise phrase of the Attorney-General would approve, but I hope that he will not resist the Clause. At least, if he is not

prepared to accept it at the moment, I trust that he will accept the principle, and will be prepared at a subsequent stage to meet this point, because it seems to me to be going far beyond what is recognised as reasonable to use vague and all-embracing words of this sort.

The Attorney-General (Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller): I have listened with interest to the observations of the hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South (Mr. Elwyn Jones) and the hon. Member for Sheffield Park (Mr. Mulley). I think that they have misunderstood this Section and in particular the effect of the words which they have criticised. If we were to accept either of the formulae put forward, it would enlarge the penal scope of this provision and perhaps bring within it some soldiers who would not be within it as the Section now stands.
If the hon. and learned Gentleman will look at the Section again, he will see that it is really a matter of defence which the last few words of Section 24 (1, c) provide. That is to say, if his act is authorised by international usage, the person who has been charged with an offence under Section 24 (1, c) should not be convicted.
The hon. and learned Gentleman emphasised quite rightly the distinction between international usage, international law and conventions, and rules of law. He made it quite clear that international law is a more precise conception than international usage and so, of course, are conventions. But international usages go beyond international law and conventions. Therefore, to adopt either of the formulae which he put forward would be to enlarge the scope of this Section by reducing the grounds of defence which could be advanced by an accused person. It would, in fact, operate in a way exactly opposite to that which the hon. and learned Member would desire.
I know that the phrase "international usage" lacks a certain precision. I think that there is no formula which can give the same protection to the defence, which is what we want to give, and at the same time give more precision.
The hon. and learned Member said that he endeavoured to raise the matter in 1955. He gave notice of it then and serious consideration was given to it in


an endeavour to meet his wishes, if that could be done. Serious consideration has again been given to it since he tabled the new Clause. However, the conclusion we have come to is that, if one put more precision into the Section by adopting a formula such as he suggests, one would be reducing the opportunities of defence of an accused person under the Section, because international law and rules of law and rights under conventions are included in international usage but are of less scope than international usage.
9.45 p.m.
I hope that I have made that clear to the hon. and learned Member and his hon. Friend and I hope also that I have made clear that, although I have dealt with the matter quite shortly now, we have considered it very carefully. The hon. and learned Gentleman spoke of these words in the subsection as exposing an accused soldier to considerable danger. I think that that is a complete misconception of how the wording operates. It really would not do to provide as an alternative to a "convention". For instance, the convention of which he spoke, which had not been ratified when the Acts were passed in 1955, does not do much in the way of saying what a prisoner may or may not lawfully do. What it does is to say what the detaining power may lawfully do. It may be said that that implies that it is lawful for the prisoner to do what he can be compelled to do; but we want the Section to go further than that for the protection of the accused soldier and give a defence not only in respect of what he may be compelled by virtue of a convention to do but also in respect of any acts which are authorised by recognised international usage. By keeping the words as they are we enlarge the area of defence.
For that reason, I ask the Committee to reject the new Clause.

Mr. Elwyn Jones: I appreciate the difficulties, but I am still impenitent at least about the wholly unsatisfactory meaning and significance of the phrase "international usage". I can see very great difficulties occurring at some future time—which I hope may never arise—

when the construction of those words may call for decision in a court martial. I think that the learned Attorney-General might yet have another look at the matter. However, I appreciate the difficulty and, if my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Park (Mr. Mulley) agrees with me, I am sufficiently aware of them not to press the matter to a Division now.

Mr. Mulley: Will my hon. and learned Friend assist me? I am unconvinced by both his argument and the argument of the Attorney-General to this extent, that I do not see why the words are required at all. Speaking for myself, as someone who for five years was a prisoner of war, I cannot think of anything I could have done which would have been detrimental to this country which would not have been caught by the preceding words. First, we have
serves with or aids the enemy in the prosecution of hostilities".
That is a very wide provision to begin with. To that one adds
or measures calculated to influence morale".
The word is "influence" morale, not change morale.
Can the Attorney-General, who is quite rightly concerned with the scope of the defence which a prisoner of war can offer and how best his defence can be conducted, explain why it need be taken any further? Can he give us any instance where the third phrase would need to be brought in, from the point of view of defence? Can he tell us if any crime could be committed by a prisoner which would not have fallen within the two preceding phrases?

The Attorney-General: My imagination does not enable me to answer that question, but that is not any reason for not including these words. I think that the addition of these words provides ground for defence which, if this particular passage was left out, would not be open to the accused person.

Mr. Mulley: These words can only have been included for the purpose of the prosecution having a wider field in which to base a charge, but that does not apply, as I understand it, to the other case at all. The words "international usage" do not get people out of a charge of "serving with or aiding the enemy". It is wholly for the benefit of


charging people, and not for permitting them to defend themselves.

Question put and negatived.

Schedules 1 to 3 agreed to.

Bill reported, with Amendments; as amended (in the Select Committee and on recommittal), considered.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

9.52 p.m.

Sir O. Prior-Palmer: I will not detain the House for more than one minute, but as Chairman of the Select Committee I want to say that I think the Bill as we now see it is a tribute to the Committee and the work which it did. I believe that the alterations which we have seen fit to introduce will reinforce the dis. cipline of the Army, without which no Army can be a fighting machine; in other words, to enable a man to control his body with his mind in exceptional and difficult circumstances.
To refer to wastage, as we all know, there is no such thing as a bad regiment, but only bad officers. I ask my right hon. Friend to have a good look at the officers, particularly the commanding officers, of some of these units with a high wastage record, and particularly the Green Jackets Brigade.
Finally, I should like to express my thanks to the members of the Select Committee for their co-operation and help in getting the Bill through.

9.53 p.m.

Mr. Cronin: I believe that the Bill will be extremely helpful, and will improve recruitment. I think that we ought to express our gratitude to the members of the Select Committee and to the hon. Member for Worthing (Sir O. Prior-Palmer), who so admirably presided over its labours.
I am sorry that the Secretary of State for War and the Under-Secretary could not find themselves able to accept more of the very helpful Amendments and new Clauses which we have put forward. Perhaps, in some ways, the Bill has some blemishes on it, rather like a wart on the Mona Lisa's nose. Nevertheless, as it is at present, it is a quite praiseworthy piece of prospective legislation and we wish it godspeed.

9.54 p.m.

Mr. Profumo: I find myself in the happy position of being able to associate myself with the remarks of my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Worthing (Sir O. Prior-Palmer) and, to a great extent, with those of the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Cronin), without the Mona Lisa smile which he had on his face. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Air and myself wish the Bill well and thank very much those who took part in the proceedings of the Select Committee. I am sure that the Bill will be for the benefit of the Armed Forces, which is what we all have in mind.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

Orders of the Day — INDONESIA

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Chichester-Clark.]

9.55 p.m.

Miss Joan Vickers: I am grateful to Mr. Speaker for allowing me to raise on the Adjournment a very important subject, namely, the future relations between this country and the great Republic of Indonesia.
My hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs said in answer to a Question:
In the interests of Europe and the world, it is better that we should seek to maintain relations with countries whether they be of extreme Right wing character or whether they be Communist."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th June, 1961; Vol. 642, c. 944.]
Indonesia is a neutralist country, and I consider that as such it is of vital importance to Great Britain in the Far East.
This Republic is formed of over 7,000 islands, more than 3,000 of which are well-populated. It stretches from the south of Singapore in a half-moon shape to the north of Australia and is inhabited by 90 million people. It is a country of great beauty and riches and as a neutralist country this is an area denied to the Communists in the Far East.
Recently thousands of Chinese were sent back to China. They were for the most part living in the villages and might have had the power to influence people to Communist ideas. The Government is what is known as a guided democracy. The people are a tolerent race and religious tolerance is practised.
I understand that at present there are eight political parties, including a Nationalist party, Moslem Scholars, and Catholic parties. They are based on Pantja Sila ideals. They are, as I under-stand it, in five particular parts—a belief in God, democracy, nationalisation, internationalisation and social justice. We have had many ties with Indonesia in the past; I think that it will be recalled that Raffles was the ruler of Java for four years. In recent years the Indonesians have taken English as their second language. It is remarkable how well they speak it, because they have only started learning it since 1950.
On 1st March, together with nine other people who were interested in Indonesia, I had an interview with the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. On 1st April, the Foreign Office, having, I hope, duly considered the views put forward by this delegation, sent an invitation to President Sukarno to visit this country. Unfortunately, his plans were already made for his overseas programme, which included an interview with President Kennedy. I hope that tonight my hon. Friend will be able to tell me that arrangements are in hand for a visit of President Sukarno to this country in 1962. I believe that General Nasution will arrive here in a few days' time, and we shall be pleased to welcome him. I hope that this will be one of many visits by distinguished people from the Republic of Indonesia. I believe that General Nasution is to see our Prime Minister. I hope that when my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister goes to the Far East he will find time to visit Jakarta. I understand, too, that the general is giving a talk at the Imperial Defence College.
I should like to mention particularly the question of trade relations with Indonesia. I did not suggest that the Board of Trade might answer this debate, because I think that trade with Indonesia depends on our Foreign Office and on our diplomatic relations with that coun-

try. I hope that the Government will come to a definite decision in regard to trading policy with Indonesia. For some years, we looked upon Indonesia as, perhaps, a nation that was not very satisfactory financially, but I should like to point out that in 1958, the foreign exchange was £31 million—

It being Ten o'clock, the Motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Chichester-Clark.]

Miss Vickers: In 1958, the foreign exchange totalled £31 million and in 1960, £114 million. Under President Sukarno, despite a great many difficulties, there has not been economic collapse, and the present régime has shown itself in a quite remarkable way able to maintain law and order. As I mentioned at the beginning, there are numerous islands and in some cases the distances by sea are great. So, all things taken into consideration, it has been remarkable how peace and order have been preserved.
It is not generally realised how interested we are as a country in Indonesia. Since the departure of the Dutch when Indonesia was declared a Republic, we have greater trading interests with Indonesia than has any other foreign country. The British rubber estates alone comprise over 298,000 acres, or 24 per cent. of the whole. This represents an investment of £45 million. In 1960, the production of rubber totalled 200,000 tons, the British share being 50,000 tons, representing £13 million from the British rubber estates for foreign exchange earnings. We also have great shipping interests. Our shipping companies undertake the majority of shipping between the islands and from this country and Europe to Indonesia. Shell has oil interests there.
The leader of a recent British trade delegation to Indonesia stated in Jakarta that after studying projects under the Indonesian eight-year development programme, he was confident that there could be close co-operation between the two countries which could begin in the fields of transport, textiles, paper processing and chemicals. He described his delegation as one of high importance and a great success.
The delegation was also impressed, I understand, by the fact of East-West credits. A multiple-purpose dam is being financed by France and Italy, the Hotel Indonesia by the Japanese reparations, the Asian Games Stadium by the U.S.S.R. and the Buket Asam coal mines by the Federal Republic of Germany. Unfortunately, the list includes nothing from Britain. I should therefore like the Government to make a decision in regard to their future policy, particularly concerning credits.
In what I say now, I am not advocating that we should necessarily sell arms to Indonesia, but I should like to mention two transactions which, perhaps, have not been very satisfactory. I understand that we have sold some armoured cars to Indonesia and that we could secure a far greater order. The problem is that the Government will not give a reasonable delivery date. Although the Alvis Company could begin delivery, I understand, within ten months of signature of contract, there is delay concerning the Government-manufactured parts. As yet, only 100 rounds of ammunition have been delivered for the armoured cars although 300 tons was ordered.
Similar trouble occurred previously concerning torpedoes. Although permission to supply them was granted by the Admiralty, permission to ship them was refused by the Foreign Office.
I said at the beginning that I am not necessarily advocating the selling of arms, but I am using this example to show that the same policy should be followed by the Admiralty, the Board of Trade and the Foreign Office. We lose overseas orders and good will by this present method. A Government policy is essential. We must also remember that the United States has granted credits of between 500 million and 600 million dollars and that the Soviet Union has granted credits of up to 800 million dollars.
When we are considering future relations with Indonesia, I am aware of the fact that we are N.A.T.O. allies of the Dutch. It is fair to say that the Dutch, by the loss of the Indies, have not lost their material prosperity and it has not been very much impaired. Individuals have, perhaps, lost everything and have suffered greatly, but the nation

as a whole has not had its material prosperity impaired.
We can no longer be of real use to the Dutch in Indonesia, because, on 10th March, Indonesia withdrew her approval of the United Kingdom looking after Dutch interests there and so deprived the few remaining Dutch citizens of all diplomatic protection. In 1633, when the English traders were murdered in Amboina, the Dutch historian, Vlekke, said that this was "only one of the many bloody episodes in the history of ruthless commercial competition." I do not want to suggest that we can go to any of these lengths and use any of these methods, but Britain should act in her own best interests and those of Indonesia.
In The Hague in 1949 a treaty was signed which said that:
The Kingdom of the Netherlands unconditionally and irrevocably transfers complete sovereignty over Indonesia to the Republic of Indonesia.
That was done with the exception of West Irian, or New Guinea. One of our main difficulties between Indonesia and ourselves arose because of our attitude over West Irian. Here, however, I believe that the feelings of the Dutch are changing. On has only to read the articles in "New Guinea" signed by over ninety Dutchmen including Professor Röliag and also the Rijkeas group and the activities in which they are indulging, the articles in our own Economist, and recent articles in de Telegraaf, and the Algemeen Handelsblad, which are Dutch papers, to see that people are trying to find a solution.
It is essential that some solution should be found in the not-too-distant future. I believe that the Indonesians are the last people to want to go to war over this problem, and I suggest that Her Majesty's Government might propose that the United States, Australia, Indonesia and Holland, with ourselves, should reopen the matter and have a discussion to see if we could not get some solution that would again give the Indonesians what they want and open up trade possibilities to the Dutch.
Then, just as our Queen—perhaps unexpectedly to many of us—went to India, we might then see the Queen of the Netherlands going to Indonesia. But this cannot be done until both sides get what they find is a solution.
If West Irian could go back to Indonesia and the Dutch could begin their trade again we might have a happy solution. Should this not be possible, however, I ask my hon. Friend whether we will in future remain neutral, as is indicated by President Kennedy that the United States will do.
I hope that we shall be able to take more students here to improve direct relations. As I said originally, the Indonesians have taken English as their second language, but too many students still have to go to Germany and other countries. The daughters of the distinguished Indonesian Ambassador to this country have themselves had to go to Germany for their education. There is a, too, great need for technical education, and in this Shell is playing a great part.
Training is also needed in the civil service and local government, and in this country we could offer a great many places in our Civil Service and local government services to trainees. We have recently had an excellent trainee in Plymouth, and in a country of many islands like Indonesia one of the things which is needed is more trained personnel.
Friends of Indonesia, mostly business people in this country, have contributed £17,000 so far to form a centre for Indonesian students, and an Anglo-Indonesian Society, formed to improve cultural relations and to help students, has been running well for several years now, thanks to the very energetic voluntary officers. The British Council in Indonesia is doing a splendid job, although it is handicapped by lack of money and lack of accommodation, particularly in Jakarta.
I hope that with all this good will it will be possible for Her Majesty's Government in the near future to put our relations on the firmest diplomatic and trading basis and that through these means we will have a very firm friend in the Far East. My hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary has a very great interest in the Far East and, as I learned when I was in Geneva, has a particularly sympathetic understanding of people. I hope that he will be ready to give all the assistance he can in helping the future relations between Great

Britain and a country which will become of growing importance in the world of the future.

10.12 p.m.

Sir John Barlow: I want quickly to support what my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) has said. She is a great authority on Indonesia, having frequently visited it and knowing the country very well. Unfortunately, although I know that part of the world fairly well, I have never been to Indonesia, although I know of the great trade which this country has done with Indonesia over very many years. I have participated in that trade, to the mutual benefit of that country and Lancashire.
In recent years, we have seen a great falling off of that trade, which has been a great loss to us both. Many of us feel that the time is ripe for closer working with Indonesia and that we can help that country and it can help us. We know that the Indonesians have many difficulties, just as we have difficulties in reopening this trade, but it will be an enormous advantage to both countries if we can do so. We know that they have their difficulties with exchange control and such things, but, with real effort on both sides, those difficulties can be overcome.
It is encouraging that within the past few months it has been arranged that a very large textile factory shall be built in Indonesia, largely by a consortium of British firms. That may be a valuable beginning to the reopening of trade between the two countries. We all know of the vast amount of rubber and tea and other tropical products of that country, and if there is good will on both sides the Indonesians can help us and we can help them, to our mutual advantage. For that reason, I hope that the Under-Secretary will throw some encouraging light on the matter.

10.15 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Mr. J. B. Godber): I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) for raising this important subject of the relations between this country and Indonesia and I assure her and my hon. Friend the Member for Middleton and


Prestwich (Sir J. Barlow), at the outset of my remarks, that Her Majesty's Government intend to do all they can to foster those relations. I was very grateful for the way in which my hon. Friend raised this matter, and for the many and very sensible things that she said.
In my view, and in the view of the Government, the long-term aims of the United Kingdom and Indonesia in the political field are essentially the same. We both need peace and stability in South-East Asia, and in the world at large, but, in particular, in this area, so that plans for the general improvement of living conditions can go forward unhindered.
Indonesia has declared her foreign policy to be neutral and independent. This is entirely acceptable to us. As Her Majesty's Government have so often made clear, we are always ready fully to respect a genuine neutrality which avoids taking sides in the disputes which, unfortunately, exist in the world today. I wish that all other countries were equally so ready.
I agree that this basic harmony of interest needs to be developed by a regular interchange of views on practical issues. For this reason, we are always very happy to welcome Indonesian leaders to Britain for such discussions. Next month, for instance, as my hon. Friend reminded us, the Indonesian Minister of National Security, General Nasution, who is also Chief of Staff of the Army, is visiting this country as the official guest of Her Majesty's Government.
Besides showing him something of this country, we are looking forward to a useful exchange of views. General Nasution will be seeing the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary as well as the Minister of Defence and the Service Chiefs. We hope that other members of the Indonesian Government will accept invitations to visit this country in the near future.
My hon. Friend referred to the invitation which Her Majesty's Government extended earlier this year to President Sukarno to pay an official visit to this country. The invitation was extended, as I think my hon. Friend said, at the beginning of April. Unfortunately, although the President was not due to come to Europe until the second half

of May, he had already arranged to leave during April, and he apparently found it difficult to fit in a visit to us at this time. It was, of course, for him to decide whether he could include such a visit this year, but we were, naturally, disappointed to learn that he was not able to do so.
In replying to our invitation, the President said that, in principle, he gladly accepted it, and we hope, as my hon. Friend hopes, that he will be able to come here in the near future. These sentiments found renewed expression in the friendly messages exchanged by President Sukarno and the Prime Minister when the President's aircraft flew over this country on its way to Dublin. It is clear that we are anxious that these visits should take place, and should continue to take place. We believe that they can play a valuable part in making for mutual understanding between our two countries.
Before coming to the question of trade, I should like to touch on one other point which my hon. Friend rightly brought to our notice, one problem which confronts us, and I say this having said that our long-term aims and those of Indonesia are essentially the same. There is this one qualification which affects our relations with Indonesia, and that is the Indonesian claim to West New Guinea.
I listened with care to what my hon. Friend said about this, but I must remind the House that as the then Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Commander Noble, made clear when he was speaking at the United Nations in November, 1957, Her Majesty's Government regard the Netherlands as the sovereign Power in that territory. But Her Majesty's Government have no direct interest in this question beyond our general interest in the preservation of peace and stability in South-East Asia. We certainly would not oppose any peacefully negotiated settlement for West New Guinea.
My hon. Friend said that the Indonesians would be the last people who would want to go to war. I am very glad to know that, and that conforms with what they told us—I think that it was Dr. Subandrio, in 1959—that the Indonesian Government would not use force to prosecute their claims.


I welcome that as being their attitude, as do the Government. In so far as they are able to make arrangements for any changes, we would certainly not wish to stand in the way of any arrangement freely entered into by both sides which was acceptable to all concerned. But this is a matter on which we have to state clearly where we stand at present.
I now turn to the question of trade. Both my hon. Friends have made out a good case for the continuation of trade and its advancement and expansion, but our relations with Indonesia in this connection are already good, and it is fair to say that they are improving the whole time. Indonesia is a large and growing market for our exports. My hon. Friend referred to the total foreign exchange earnings of Indonesia. These are striking figures. It is significant that its trade with this country in terms of exports from the United Kingdom, has risen since 1958 from £7½ million to just over £11 million in 1959, and, in 1960, to £19 million. The House will agree that this is a very substantial rate of increase. Indeed, if we could carry on in that way with the whole world our present problems would be very much minimised. It is encouraging that this trade is increasing in this way.
Her Majesty's Government are doing their best to ensure that this trend continues. My hon. Friend referred to the British trade mission which visited Indonesia earlier this year, under the joint sponsorship of the Board of Trade and the Federation of British industries, and which included representatives of engineering, mining machinery, shipbuilding and motor vehicle manufacturing interests. From all I hear the mission's visit to Indonesia was an outstanding success, and I am glad to see that manufacturers in this country are taking a great deal of interest in the trading opportunities which Indonesia offers. I can assure the House that Her Majesty's Government are keenly interested in this subject, and eager to do all they can to help.
I was interested in the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Middleton and Prestwich about the new textile factory, which, I understand, is to be built by British firms. This is a welcome development. I am sure that there are

many further opportunities in the various fields in which we have a close identity of interest, and I welcome any developments in this sphere and hope that we can see an expansion in every way. I can assure the House that Her Majesty's Government will do all they can to expand and encourage this trade.
Trade, however, is not a one-sided process. The figures for the United Kingdom imports from Indonesia during the past few years have been generally lower than those for exports to Indonesia. The discussions which the trade mission had with the authorities in Indonesia naturally dealt with the possibilities of increasing Indonesian exports to the United Kingdom as well as with the flow of goods in the opposite direction. I am sure that there are many opportunities.
Another way in which we are able to give the Indonesian Government some help with their development schemes is in the field of technical assistance. There are now about 30 Indonesian students following courses in the United Kingdom under the Colombo Plan. Equipment, films and books have been presented to a number of educational establishments in Indonesia, and five experts in such subjects as town planning and English language teaching are now serving in Indonesia. I was very glad to hear what my hon. Friend the Member for Devon-port said about the work of the British Council in that respect. I am sure that there is a great deal of scope there, and I am glad to know that my hon. Friend feels that the British Council is doing such a good job in this way.
A number of British firms have been established in Indonesia for a long time, and are still operating in the fields mentioned by my hon. Friends and in others as well. We hope that these concerns will be able for a long time to come to continue making their useful contributions to the total of Indonesia's economic activity, and, I hope, help in raising the standard of living of the people of that country to the mutual benefit of the trade which they can help to encourage.
My hon. Friend touched on the question of armaments. This is a difficult subject, as I am sure she realises. The export of arms to any part of the world is bound to be wrapped up with other


aspects which have to be taken into consideration. All individual items, whether to Indonesia or anywhere else, are carefully examined on their individual merits by Her Majesty's Government in the light of the circumstances prevailing at the time.
This principle has to be applied universally, but, in general, it has not prevented the supply in a good many cases of the things which Indonesia has sought. There is also the problem of some purchases which the E.C.G.D. cover. That point has to be borne in mind. But we continue to do what we can in that sphere. Obviously, there are limitations to the total amount which can be approved. I hope that what I have said shows the House that the Government are very conscious of the need both politically to encourage closer understanding in every way possible and also to build up this trade as a valuable part of our overseas trade, and as a way of stimulating greater contact with this important country—and I accept my hon. Friend's description—which can only he of mutual advantage to both countries.
I therefore hope that the House accepts my assurance that the Government are fully conscious of the importance of Anglo-Indonesian relations. Good relations with Indonesia matter greatly to us now and they will matter still more in the future. This populous and fertile country is certain to go on developing rapidly. Her market for British goods will grow. Her political influence will increase. Her Majesty's Government look forward to seeing a strong and prosperous Indonesia, which will help to bring peace and stability to South-East Asia.
For that reason I have welcomed the debate tonight and the opportunity which it has given me to state this on behalf of the Government and to assure the House that we shall seek to ensure the full and friendly co-operation of the United Kingdom in promoting Indonesia's future development.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-eight minutes past Ten o'clock.